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Yourself and the Neighbors 

Beumas MacMauus' Latest Book— Ninth Edition. 
Illustrated' by Thomas f'ogarty. 



"Once In a great many years there Ib publlahed a ;book 
that stands out bo pre-eminently above the general run of 
books that it deserves to be classed among tne masterpieces 
o*f fi. country's literature. Such a book is SSeumas MacManui* 
'Yourself and the Neighbors/ "—The Baltimore 8un. 

"If Seumas MacManus is not taken to our bosom and cher- 
ished as a classic, then all signs by which we estimate geniui 
fail."— :f 'Tie Lo8 Angelea Times. 

"Here he puts the soul of his race into language exquisite.''— 
New York Times. 

Oeorge W. Ckihle says: I may have read as good English — 
not often, however. Assuredly Seumas Mac Manus's las mas- 
ter pen ,and a joy to me which I mean to make permanent. 

Jttmes Whiicomb Riley-' I read it with avidity— as I read 
every line of Seumas MacManus. 

Archbishop Prendergast: Now that I have read It every 
word and many parts more than once, I wish to say that it 
is the most delightful book of its kind I ever read. It «hould 
be in the home of every one of our race the world over. 

David Beluaco: I wonder if Seumas MacManus realizes how 
fine this work Is. It is so charming, fresh, and quaintly 
humorous, and at the same time so pathetically tender,, that 
I smiled and laughed and gulped 'aU in one breath." 

Mark Sullivan, Editor of Colliers: I have read it with the 
intensesi interest, line by line, and am ordering the rest of 
Seumas MacManus' books. 

Wm. Marion Reedy (In the Mirror) : It Isl the best, the very 
best projection of Irish life that I scan recall— better than 
Lover, or Lever, or Banim, or Gerald Griffin— and worth a 
wilderness of th« works of George Moore. 

President of Notre Dame University, Rev. John Pavanaugh: 
1 believe it Is the noblest and most beautiful book ever writ- 
ten about Ireland. 

Judge Ben B. Lindsey: It grips. It brings laughter and 
teai"s by turns. It Is a great story by one of the greatest 
story-tellers In the world. 

""^rchbisJi^p Ireland: It Is a'wonderfully beautiful book, both 
in sentiment and diction. 

Edwin Markham; I am struck by the freshnessi, beauty,, 
poesy,, of this, tho best work Seumas MacManus has ever 
done. 

Ex-Qovemor pfohn K. Tener, of Pennsylvania: Already I 
have nearly finished this delightful— yes, delicious— book. 
When I got into th« swlnir of it, I sang rather than r«ad th« 
pases. 



Ruth McEnery Stuart; This book Is a delight— and |for 80 
many Qualities that I find them filmost lost iu the word 
"charm." Many times in my reading 1 found my eyeis filling 
with tears— ol" keen delight and sympathy— und pride too. 
This work is the real thing, and as viial as i:>eumas MacMauus' 
first touch, which made the world look his way. ^,^.^^_^__ 

Presidettit Chase, Bates College: This intensely iuterestinj; 
book helped me to understand, to appreciate, to love, and to 
admire the Irish people to a degree that has enriched my own 
miud, and made more tender my own heart. 

(Jhief Justice of Canada, Sir Charles Fitzpatrick: I thank 
Seumas MacManus for giving me here the key to all the 
charm of the Irish people. 

Chancellor McCoimick, University of Pittsburgh: I wonder 
whether Seumas MacManus himself realizes what a fine piece 
of work he has here done. 1 dare anyone to spend an hour 
reading this book and not rise from it a kinder, gentler, finer 
soul. The worlds when it comes to know the book, will thank 
Seumas MacManus for it as I thank him. 

Price (including postage) $1.65. 

THE MANAGEMENT, SEUMAS MacMANUS 
Box 1313, New York City 



A Lad of the O'Friels 

By SEUMAS MacMANUS. 

Fiona MacLeod says: An admirable piece k)f work, true to 
life, true in sentiment, true in touch, with vivid actuality 
and thp breath of romance, and a very real and appealing 
winsome charm. ... It gave me sincere and deep pleasure 
to read this delightful book. 

Kew Ireland Review: The poetry of Irish homely life has 
never been more faithfully and more vtouchingly portrayed 
than In this book. It is a powerful (piece of work. 

Boston Transcript: This book is a landmark, showing the 
height of excellence to which the flood of fiction may rise. 

Punch: A charming book sure of lasting fame and popularity. 

To-Day: It grips and enthrals the reader, 

Dundee Courier: A more delightful book than "A Lad of 
the O'Friels'* has not left the press for a long time. 

Pall Mall OazGtte: A literary achievement of great dlstlnc> 
tlon. 

Irish Independent: Of all novels of Irish life„ "A Lad of 
the O'Friels" sings truest. 

Price (including postage) $1.K. 

FROM THE MacMANUS MANAGEMENT 
Box 1313. New York Cltj 



IRELAND'S Case 



SEUMAS MacMANUS 



New York 

The Irish Publishing Co. 
P. O. Box 1313 



Copyright 1017, by SEUMAS MacMANUS 



JiiAsia 



Copright, ISIT, 
Bj Beumai MacManus 






S)Cf.A4T98 5 
/1^ . I 



To JOHN DEVOY 

Because you bestowed yourself on a forlorn cause- 
without seeking reward or honor — and without getting 
them: 

t 

Because, when the night was blackest, and the way 
was loneliest, with few workers to cheer, but alas! many 
lurkers to sneer, you, unheeding, toiled faithfully on : 

Because though the faint-hearted failed you, saying 
the Day could never dawn, and the false-hearted assailed 
you, saying it should never dawn, you still kept your 
determined way: 

And because now, with the brave band which you took 
safely through the traps and treacheries of the Night, 
you, vindicated, stand at the threshold of the Dawn, 
whence you see the spears of ;the Resurrection morn 
strike the sky: 

I would lend lustre to this little book by writing down 
at its beginning — even without your permission — ^your 
worthy name — 

And the golden name of 

THE CLAN-na-nGAODHAL. 

S. M. M. 



Order of Chapters 



I. Before England Came. 

II. Elizabeth Civilizes Ireland, 

III. And Then Came Cromwell. 

IV. England Fosters Irish Industries. 
V. The Penal Laws. 

VI. Still the Penal Laws. 

VII. The British Garrison in Ireland. 

VIII. Resources of English Civilization. 

IX. The Union— God Bless It. 

X. Our English Land Laws. 

XI. The Last Century in Ireland. 

XII. England's Present-day System^ 

XIII. Has the Leopard Changed His Spots? 

XVI. The Summing Up. 



FOREWORD 

In the course of my lecture tour last winter I 
was due to talk to a certain large Woman's Club 
in a Pacific Coast City. The women were dis- 
cussing the subject on which I should be aske/S 
to address them. One of the members made 
claim that they should have, from me, an histori- 
cal talk upon Ireland. The President of the 
Club, a truly cultured woman, looked sympa- 
thetically through her lorgnette at the member 
who had spoken, and patiently pointed out to 
the ignorant one, "But, my dear, you must know 
that Ireland hasn't any history." 

My continuous peregrinations through Ameri- 
ca have shown me that Americans know nothing 
of Irish history. 

Irish-Americans know probably double as 
much as do Americans. So you can credit them 
with double 'ought on the subject. 

And you may, at the same time, conservatively 
credit five or six times 'ought to the purely Irish 
here. 

In the case of the Irish this is criminal ignor- 
ance. In Americans it is largely the fault of 



English historians who, through the generation?, 
have done their best to shed abundant darkness 
upon the subject of Ireland — and of theK coun- 
try's relations with Ireland. And it is partly 
due to the lack of a good, gripping, readable, Irish 
history being popularized here. 

It is a century since Plowden was moved in his 
honesty to protest against his brother historians* 
continuous and persistent misrepresentation and 
beclouding of Ireland's story. But honest Plow- 
den's protesting was about as effective as the 
badger's trying to blow the breeze from his door. 
Except in rare instances, English historians have 
ever since stuck to their traditional policy of 
either ignoring Ireland's wonderful history or 
gaibling and misrepresenting it. 

This little book is compiled for the purpose of 
enlightening all who need it, only upon the fear- 
fully tragic story of Ireland's connection with 
England. And even in that it only touches some 
of the high spots. 

It is the duty of every man and woman of Irish 
blood, first to study and digest for themselves the 
following papers, and next to force them on the 
notice of the purely American people — ^to make 
Americans study and digest them likewise — thus 
opening their eyes to a revelation that wiH shock 

8 



them out of their present unwitting ignorance 
and unblamable indifference. 

If Irish-American readers do this perseveringly 
and conscientiously, Ireland's cause will get new, 
forceful allies. 

I suppose it is superfluous to point out that 
the persecuting English Protestant who will be 
so often mentioned in these chapters, is no nearer 
kin to the reader's sincere Protestant neighbor, 
whom he knows and loves, than is the politician 
to the patriot. 

I may say that I hope the present little work, 
a preliminary canter into Irish history, is the 
forerunner of a far more ambitious one. The 
STORY OF THE IRISH RACE, on which I 
am working, and which, within two years, I 
may» with God's help, be able to present to Am- 
ericans and to Irish alike. 

New York, July i, 1917. 



9 



BEFORE ENGLAND CAME 
CHAPTER I. 

It was in the year of Our Lord, 1172 that 
England's army of invasion landed in Ireland. 

Some of my readers know— but I fear many 
of them do not know — that for hundreds of years 
before that, the little Island sitting on the West- 
ern Ocean, was a hive of learning. For many 
centuries it had been the school of Europe. 

In his "Age of the Saints," Borlase says, *'Ire- 
land was the center of all the religious and liter- 
ary life of the North. Thither every peaceful 
scholar and every philosopher fled for refuge, be- 
fore the Pagan hordes which swooped over Eur- 
ope." And M. Darmesteter says, "Ireland was the 
asylum of the higher learning which took refuge 
there from the uncultured states of Europe. The 
Renaissance began in Ireland 700 years before 
it was known in Italy. At one time Armagh, the 
ecclesiastical capital of Ireland, was the metro- 
polis of civilization." 

Though Ireland's schools had been heard of 
on the Continent of Europe before Saint Patrick 

II 



IRELAND'S CASE 

brought Christianity to Ireland in 432, it was 
under the stimulus of the new faith that the great 
schools multiplied in Ireland — in the sixth and 
seventh centuries — and fixed the eyes of Europe. 
They attracted crowds of hungering scholars 
from the Continent, to whom, as testified by the 
ancient Saxon chronicler, the Venerable Bede, 
Ireland gave food and shelter, the use of her 
books, ajid the service of her famous teachers, 
gratis. 

The sixteenth century Briton, Camden, treat- 
ing; of the manner in which the English in the 
early centuries had flocked to the Irish schools— 
and of the distinction conferred upon a foreigner 
who could boast an Irish education says: "Hence 
it is frequently read in our histories of holy men, 
'He has been sent to Ireland to school.* *' 

The Reverend Dr. Milner in his history of the 
English Church, says, "The Irish clergy were 
then the luminaries of the Western World. To 
them we are indebted for the preservation of 
the Bible, the Fathers, and the Classics. Then, a 
residence in Ireland, like a residence now at a 
university, was almost essential to establish a 
literary reputation." 

We have record of seven Egyptian monks dy- 
ing in Ireland in the eighth century. And also we 

13 



SEFOkE ENGLAND CAME 

find fifty natives of Rome "attracted to Ireland 
by the repute of the people for piety and learn- 
ing, and especially for knowledge of the Sacred 
Scripture." And still again we find an account of 
150 people, natives of Rome and Italy, sailing in 
company to Ireland the renowned. 

The School of Glendalough in the County of 
Wicklow, was attended by two thousand stu- 
dents. The School of Clonard on the Boyne 
was attended by three thousand students. 
King Dagobert II. of France was educated 
there. From this school, Ussher tells usi 
"Scholars came out in as great numbers as 
Greeks from the side of the horse of Troy." The 
School of Bangor in the County Down, one of 
the most famous of the Irish Schools, was attend- 
ed by three thousand students. 

The g^eat School of Clonmacnoise, founded 
by St. Ciaran in the sixth century, was attended 
by six thousand students. A great university 
city grew up around it. St. Seananus tells how 
he, in one day, saw no less than seven ships 
carrying scholars from the Continent of Europe, 
tail up the River Shannon, bound for the School 
of Clonfert, on an Island in the river. 

And through those early centuries the Irish 
schools were not only receiving and educating 

13 



mELAMD'S CASE 

schollars from the Continent, but, year after year, 
they were sending forth to .t^^e Continent of Eur- 
ope learned men and holy men who went travel- 
ling in bands, bearing the light of learning and 
the torch of faith to the barbarous and semi-bar- 
barous nations of the Continent, founding schools, 
churches, and monasteries wherever they went. 
The Irish saints of those days are the patron 
saints of many corners of Europe which they 
evangelized. Saint Columbanus evangelized 
Burgundy and Lombardy in the sixth century. 
He founded an Irish monastery at Luxeuil in 
France and a school at Bobbio in Italy where 
he died.* The Irish Saint Cathal (Cathaldus), 
after whom San Cataldo in Italy is named, is 
the patron saint of Tarentum in Italy of which 
he was Bishop. Saint Fergal (Virgilius) Irish 
geometer, who, in the eighth century preached 
the sphericity of the earth, was Bishop of Salz- 
burg. Saint Colman is the patron saint of Lower 
Austria. Saint Gall, who founded the famous 
Irish School and monastery named after him in 
Switzerland, is the great Swiss saint. Saint 



* I would advise my readers to get Mrs, 
Tomas O'Concannon's very fine Life of St. Co- 
lumban, 

14 



BEFORE ENGLAND CAME 

Fiacra did wonderful work for Christianity in 
France. Saint Kilian is the saint of Franconia. 

The Irish monks, Aidan and his fellows, dis- 
ciples of Saint Colmcille, going forth from Colm- 
cille's school on lona, went down through Britain, 
evangelizing and teaching. It is said that, 
about the middle of the seventh century there 
was only one Bishop in all England not of Irish 
consecration, namely. Bishop Agilberct of Wes- 
sex. Yet he was trained in Ireland. 

Good St. Bernard testified, "Ireland poured 
out swarms of Saints, like an inundation, upon 
foreign countries." 

Antissiodorus, of old, said, "It may be super- 
fluous to relate how all Ireland, as it were, emi- 
grated to our shores with her swarms of philoso- 
phers." 

The Continental scholars admit that St. Co- 
lumbanus, evangelizer of Burgundy and Lom- 
bardy, was head and shoulders above all scholars 
of his day in Europe. The Emperor Charle- 
magne, gathered to his court great numbers of 
the Irish scholars. The court tutor Qement was 
an Irishman. The great Irish astronomer. Dun- 
gall, who explained for the Emperor (in a docu- 
ment still preserved, dated 8ii), the eclipses of 
the sun which occurred in 8io and which had 

IS 



IRELATTD^S CASE 

terrified Charlemagne's subjects, came to reside 
at the Imperial Court, at the request of Charle- 
magne. Charlemagne's grandson, Lothajre, had 
Dungail found the School of Pavia in Italy for 
civilizing the Lombards. 

Some of the old writers relate the quaint story 
of how in Charlemagne's day there arrived in 
the royal City two men from Ireland, who, go- 
ing to the market-place, took a prominent stand 
there, and to the gaping, wondering crowds an- 
nounced knowledge for sale. When word of 
their strange proceedings was carried to the Em- 
peror he ordered the men from Ireland to be 
fetched to his Palace — where he asked them their 
price for knowledge. They answered, "A shel- 
tering roof, food and clothing, and eager-minded 
pupils." This price he readily and quickly 
ordered to be paid to the Irish knowledge ven- 
dors. 

Sxaliger Le Jeune, the French critic, says that 
in Charlemagne's day, almost all the learned men 
in Europe were Irishmen. In Charles the Bald's 
time it was said on the Continent that every man 
there who knew Greek was either an Irishman, 
or the pupil of an Irishman. 

That wonderful Irish scholar, Johannes Scotus 
Erigena, always referred to by the Continental 

i6 



BEFORE ENGLAND CAME 

scholars, as "The Master/' and described as "a 
miracle of learning" — poet, philosopher and the- 
ologian- — was brought over by King Charles the 
Bald, and made head of his School in Paris. 

Professor Stokes enumerates in the tenth cen- 
tury twenty-four Irish schools in France, eighteen 
in Germany, not to mention the many in Italy, 
Switzerland and the Lowlands. The German 
philosopher. Professor Goerres says, "To Ireland 
the affrighted spirit of truth had flown during the 
Gothic irruptions in Europe, and there made its 
abode in safety until Eurc^pe returned to repose, 
when these hospitable philosophers, who had 
given it an asylum, were called by Europe to re- 
store its effulgent light over her bedarkened 
forests." 

In their address to Daniel O'Connell in the time 
of his Repeal agitation, the German College men 
said: "We never can forget to look upon your 
beloved country as our mother in religion, that 
already, at the reimotest periods of the Christian 
era. commiserated our people, and readily sent 
forth her spiritual sons to rescue our pagan an- 
cestors from idolatry at the sacrifice of her own 
property and blood, and to entail upon them the 
blessings of the Christian faith." 

Hieric in his biography of Saint Germanus, 

17 



IRELAND'S CASE 

written in the latter part of the ninth century, 
says in the course of his dedication of the book 
to the Emperor, "Need I remind Ireland that she 
sent troops of philosophers over land and sea to 
our distant shores, that her most learned sons 
offered gifts of wisdom of their own free will, in 
the service of our learned King, oar Solomon/* 

The eminent Celtologist, the late Professor 
Zimmer (of the University of Berlin) says: "Ire- 
land can not only boast of having been the birth- 
place and abode of high culture in the fifth and 
sixth centuries, but ilso of having made stren- 
uous efforts in the seventh century to spread her 
learning among the German and Romance peo- 
ples, thus forming the actual foundations of our 
present Continental civilization." 

Their love of faith and their love of learning 
were two passions— -or was it one passion? which 
thrilled the souls of the Irish people. And they 
were consumed with eagerness to share with the 
unfortunate ones abroad, the blessing that Heav- 
en had so bountifully bestowed on them at home. 
Hence, for long centuries, there was pouring out 
from Ireland and spreading everywhere, from Ice- 
land to Africa, from Biscay to Syria, a steady 
stieam of fiery crusaders armed with Bible and 
Cross, and girded with stylus and tablets, who 



BEFORE ENGLAND CAME 

knew not rest nor ease while still any corner of 
the darkened Continent yearned for the light of 
faith. In wave after wave they came, dispers- 
ing themselves over many lands, and lavishing, 
wherever they went, their golden treasure — till 
Ireland became known throughout the Continent 
of Europe by the phrase Insula Sanctorum et 
Doctorum, Island of Saints and Scholars ; and 
the name of Eire became in the mouths of the 
Eu- jpean populace a holy name, as well as a 
name of mystery and wonder. 



19 



CHAPTER It 

ELIZABETH CIVILIZES IRELAND 

Though the Danes had ravaged many quarters 
of Ireland in the ninth and tenth centuries — un- 
til they were cast out by King Brian Boru in 
IC14 — the schools were again flourishing, beauti- 
ful churches and monasteries were being erected, 
and Ireland was holding aloft once more the torch 
of learning whose light had for so long lighted 
the world's path, when the English, in 1172 be- 
gan the conquest which it took long and terrible 
centuries to consummate — if it was ever con- 
summated. 

Conquering Ireland, inch by inch, it took up- 
wards of four hundred fearful years before they 
had extended their rule to the country's four cor- 
ners. During all of those more than four cen- 
turies, Ireland got but few moments of respite 
from war. Though to name it respite is, after all, 
bitter irony. For when Ireland was not shaken 
by war, it was racked by infinitely worse than 
war. 

Mrs. Green (widow of the English historian 

20 



ELIZABETH CIVILIZES IRELAND 

Green) says, ''At a prodigious price, at any con- 
ceivable cost of human woe, the purging ot the 
soil from the Irish race was begun. There was 
no protection for any soul — the old, sick, infants, 
women or scholars. No quarter was allowed, no 
fcith kept, and no truce given. Chiefs were made 
to draw and carry, to abase them — poets and 
historians were slaughtered, and their books of 
genealogies burned." 

Under Elizabeth, Ireland almost touched the 
depths. Her troops butchered and burned, car- 
ried fire and sword to the ends of the Island — 
and left the hitherto smiling and fruitful province 
of Munster, a blackened and desolate waste. The 
old English chronicler, HoUinshed, vividly de- 
scribes this desolation — "The land which before 
was populous," he says, "and rich in all the good 
blessings of God; plenteous of corn; full of cat- 
tle; well-stored with fruits and other commodi- 
ties ; is now waste and barren, yielding no fruit, 
the pastures no cattle, the fields no corn, the air 
no birds. Finally, every way, the curse of God is 
so great and the land become so barren — both 
of man and beast, that whoever did travel from 
one end of Munster to the other, over six score 
miles, would not meet any man or child, save in 

21 



IRELAND'S CASE 

towns and cities; nor yet see any beasts save 
wolves, dogs and other ravening things." 

It was the curse of God observe, not that of 
Elizabeth, whicli had fallen upon Ireland. 
Always, to the good Briton, when England curses 
God applauds. 

And of the stricken survivors of Elizabeth's 
Wars in the South, the English poet, Edmund 
Spenser, who came as Chief Secretary to Ireland, 
says "At that time, out of the woods and glyns 
came creeping forth upon their hands (being un- 
able to stand upright, from starvation), things 
that looked like anatomies of death, that chattered 
like ghosts risen out of their graves. And they 
did eat the carrions, happy where they could find 
them/' 

The English General, Sir Richard Perrin, ex- 
ultingly wrote that he left "neither corn^ nor 
horn, nor house unburnt, between Kinsale and 
Ross/' 

And the Irish chroniclers, the Four Masters, 
writing of one of the vast tracts of Munster over 
which the civilizers had swept — under date, 1582. 
say "Neither the lowing of a cov/, nor the voice 
of a plowman was, this year, to be heard here." 

Sir Henry Sidney (Deputy) at length informed 
Elizabeth, "There are not, I am sure, in any re- 

22 



ELIZABETH CIVILIZES IRELAND 

gion where the name of Christ is professed such 
horrible spectacles as are here to be beheld — ^yea 
the view of bones and skulls, of dead who, partly 
by murder and partly by famine, have died in the 
fields, is such that hardly any Christian can with 
dry eye behold." 

Elizabeth did not content herself with merely 
civilizing. She also evangelized in the most per- 
suasive Christian way. In the twenty-seventh 
year of the reign of Elizabeth it was 
enacted that ''Every Romish priest found 
in the Island is deemed guilty of rebellion. 
He shall be hanged till half dead, then 
his head taken off, his bowels drawn out and 
burnt, and his head fixed on a pole in some pub- 
lic place." While the criminal who would shel- 
ter a priest was to have all his goods confiscated, 
and for his flagrant crime die upon the gallows. 

This Act of course was only meant as a rough 
working basis for the introduction of Christian 
light and love into the souls of the benighted 
Irish. The authorities were required to improve 
upon it by working out practical details. In the 
case of Archbishop O'Hurley of Cashel, for in- 
stance, the sublime beauty of true Christianity 
was brought home to him and to those whom he 
misled, by the simple but effective device of put- 

23 



IRELAND'S CASE 

ting his legs into loose jack boots which were 
then filled with quick lime and water; and letting 
him meditate upon the wondrous splendor of the 
English religion, while his legs were being slowly 
e^ten to the bone — after which other ingenious 

persuasions were practised on him, before his be- 
ing hung upon the gallows. A Protestant his- 
torian, revolting at this, describes the torture as 
"The most horrible torture known to humanity." 

That was a sample out of thousands of the 
evangelizing methods of Elizabeth in Ireland. 
Let us note some samples of the civilizing — say 
the massacres of Smerwick, Clannaboy and Mul- 
laghmast. 

A garrison of Spanish allies of the Irish, who 
held Smerwick Fort in Kerry, was attacked by 
English troops under the Deputy, Lord Grey. 
On promise of mercy, the Spaniards surrendered. 
After their arms had been collected from them 
Grey sent into the fort a company of English 
.soldiers under Sir Walter Raleigh to give these 
I fellows a taste of English mercy. Every Span- 
^ iard was butchered in cold blood. Sir Walter 
Raleigh was rewarded with a grant of forty thou- 
sand acres (of other people's property of course), 
in County Cork. It should be noted that the gen- 

24 



ELIZABETH CIVILIZES IRELAND 

tie poet, Edmund Spenser, made public defence of 
the Smerwick massacre. 

In this connection I would pause to emphasize 
the essential and unconscious brutality of the 
Saxon nature when we find even the most beau- 
tiful minded of the race — one who had such lofty- 
imagination, sweet fancy, and rare poetic soul as 
Edmund Spenser, not only defending this hor- 
rible deed, but actually advocating, as he did, 
that since the Irish nation could not be made 
amenable to fire and sword, the race could be 
wiped out (to make room for good Englishmen) 
by creating famine and pestilence among them. 
"The end will (I assure me) ' be very short." 
Spenser says in his State of Ireland: "Although 
there should none fall by the sword nor be slain 
by the soldier ... by this hard restraint they 
would quietly consume themselves, and devour 
one another." 

The massacre of Mullaghmast is probably a 
still better illustration of Elizabeth's forcible and 
effective civilizing strokes in Ireland. To the 
Rath of Mullaghmast were invited by English 
proclamation, some hundreds of the leading men 
among the Irish within the Pale — chiefly men 
of the clans O'Connor and O'More — invited for 
a friendly interview. When they were collected, 

25 



IRELAND'S CASE 

they were surrounded by three or four lines of 
horse and foot, fallen upon, and murdered to the 
last man. No single soul was permitted to escape 
from the dreadful Rath of Mullaghmast. 

And then Clannaboy. The Earl of Essex in- 
duced the Chief, Brian O'Neill of Clannaboy, to 
make peace with him. But a dead O^Neill was 
always a more comfortable sight to the English 
than a live one. To celebrate the peace-making the 
Earl with a great troop of retainers visited O'Neill. 
Well, and purposely, armed they attended 
the banquet given to Brian in his castle — to which 
banquet Brian had invited many of his fellows of 
note. In the middle of the banquet, when all the 
Irish were off their guard, at a given signal the 
English drew their weapons and massacred all 
of the Irish present with the exception of O'Neill, 

his wife, and his brother, who were carried to 
Dublin and there cut in quarters — as a stimulus 
to the Irish nation to respect, imitate, and adopt 
English civiliza'don. 

This massacre of Clanuaboy is treated by 
Ethna Carbery in one of her most stirring 
ballads — 

26 



ELIZABETH CIVILIZES IRELAND 
THE BETRAYAL OF CLANNABUIDHE* 

(Belfast Castle, November, 1574) 

From Brian O'Neill in his Northern home 

Went swiftly a panting vassal, 
Bidding the lord of Essex come 

To a feast in his forded castle, 
To a friendly feast where the gleaming foam 

Of the wine-cup crowned the wassail. 
To Brian O'Neill came his gentle wife. 

And wild were her eyes of warning; 
"A banquet-chamber of blood and strife, 

I dreamt of 'twixt night and morning, 
And a voice that keened for a Chieftain's life"— 
But he laughed as he kissed her, scorning. 

"In peace have I bidden the strangers here, 

And not to the note of battle; 
My flagons await them with bubbling cheer, 

I have slaughtered my choicest cattle; 
And sweetest of harpings shall greet thine ear, 

Aroon ! o'er the goblet's rattle/' 
In pride he hath entered his banquet hall, 

Unwitting what may betide him, 



♦From Ethna Carbery's "The Four Winds of Eirfnn 
(Funk, Wagnalls Co.) 



M 



IRELAND'S CASE 

Girded round by his clansmen tall, 

And his lady fair beside him ; 
From his lips sweet snatches of music fall, 

And none hath the heart to chide him. 

Hath he forgotten his trust betrayed 

In the bitterest hour of trial? 
Hath he forgotten his prayer half-stayed 

At the Viceroy's grim denial? 
And the bloody track of the Saxon raid 

On the fertile lands of Niall? 

Essex hath coveted Massareene, 

And Toome by the Bann's wide border, 

Edenhucarrig s dark towers — the scene 
Of hard-won fight's disorder; 

And Castlereagh, set in a maze of green 
Tall trees, like a watchful warder. 

Brian O'Neill he hath gazed adown 

Where the small waves, one by one, met 

The sward that sloped from the hilltops thrown 
Dusky against the sunset; 

Sighed in his soul for his lost renown, 
And the rush of an Irish onset. 

28 



ELIZABETH CIVILIZES IRELAND 

Woe ! he is leagued with his father's foe, 

Hath buried the ancient fever 
Of hate, while he watches his birthright go 

Away from his hands for ever; 
No longer Clan-Niall deals blow for blow. 

His country's bonds to sever. 

I|t 3»C * 3|( 4^ « 

Over the Ford to his castle grey 

They troop with their pennons flying — 

(Was that the ring of a far hurrah, 
Or the banshee eerily crying?) 

In glittering glory the gallant array 

Spurs hard up the strand, low-lying. 

Three swift-speeding days with the castle's lord 
They had hunted his woods and valleys ; 

Three revelling nights while the huge logs roared, 
And the bard with his harp-string dallies, 

Freely they quaffed of the rich wine, poured 
As meed of the courtly sallies. 

(Yet one fair face in the laughing crowd 
Grew wan as the mirth waxed faster. 

Her blue eyes saw but a spectral shroud, 
And a spectral host that passed her; 

Her ears heard only the banshee's loud 
Wild prescience of disaster.) 

29 



IRELAND'S CASE 

Gaily the voice of the chieftain rang, 

Deeply his warriors blended 
In chant of the jubilant song they sang 

Ere the hours of the feasting ended; 
Eut hark ! Why that ominous clash and clang? 

And what hath that shout portended? 

What Speech uncourteous this clamor provokes. 
Through the midst of the banter faring? 

Forth flashes the steel from the festal cloaks, 
Vengeful and swift, unsparing — 

And Clannabuidhe's bravest reel *neath the 
strokes, 
Strive blindly, and die despairing! 

O'Gilmore sprang to his Tanist's side 

Shrilling his war-cry madly — 
Ah ! far are the kerns who at morning-tide 

Would flock to the summons gladly ; 
The echoes break on the rafters wide, 

And sink into silence sadly. 

Captive and bleeding he stands — the lord 
Of the faithful dead around him; 
Captive and bleeding — the victor horde 

In their traitorous might surround him; 

30 



ELIZABETH CIVILIZES IRELAND 

From his turrets is waving their flag abhorred, 

And their cruel thongs have bound him. 
« ♦ 4t * * « 

Cold are the fires in the banqueting hall, 
Withered the flowers that graced it, 

Silent for ever the clansmen tall 

Who stately and proudly paced it; 

Gloom broods like a pall o'er each lofty wall 
For the foul deed that disgraced it. 

There is grief by the shores of the Northern sea, 
And grief in the woodlands shady, 

There is wailing for warriors stout to see, 
Of the sinewy arm and steady; 

There is woe for the Chieftain of Clannabuidhe, 
And tears for his gentle lady. 

The honest Scottish Protestant Dr. Smiles 
sums up the Elizabethan work in Ireland, "Men, 
women and children wherever found were put in- 
discriminately to death. The soldiery was mad 
for blood. Priests were murdered at the altar, chil- 
dren at their mother's breast. The beauty of 
woman, the venerableness of age, the innocence 
of youth was no protection against these san- 
guinary demons in human form." 

And old Hollinshed enthusiastically sets down, 

31 



IRELAND'S CASE 

"The soldiers in the camps were so hot upon the 
spur, and so eager upon the vile rebels, that they 
spared neither man, woman or child. They put 
all to the sword." 

Cox, an English writer of the old time, tells 
with much relish, "They performed their duty so 
effectually and brought the rebels to so low a con- 
dition that they saw three children eating the en- 
trails of their dead mother, on whose flesh they 
had fed many days." 

The historian Lecky (a bitter anti-Home Ruler, 
and staunch upholder of British power in Ire- 
land), admits in the preface to his "History of 
Ireland in the Eighteenth Century." "The slaugh- 
ter of Irishmen was looked upon as literally the 
slaughter of wild beasts. Not only men, but even 
v/omen and children who fell into the hands of 
the English, were deliberately and systematically 
butchered. Bands of soldiers traversed great 
tracts of country, slaying every living thing they 
met." And he also says, "The suppression of the 
native race was carried on with a ferocity which 
surpassed that of Alva in the Netherlands, and 
which has seldom been exceeded in the pages of 
history.*' 

It is no wonder that in a short time one of her 
soldier courtiers was able to convey to Eliza- 

32 



ELIZABETH CIVILIZES IRELAND 

bcth the gratifying Intelligence. "There is now 
little left in Ireland for your Majesty to reign 
over, but carcasses and ashes." 

And Sir George Carew — after doing his fearful 
share, with rack and torch and sword, in reducing 
Ireland almost to a solitude — wiped his sword, 
took up his pen, and leisurely wrote his Hibernia 
Pacata — Ireland Pacified ! 

The only other quality in an Englishman's 
makeup that is at all comparable with his un- 
conscious brutality, is his unconscious humor. 



CHAPTER III. 
AND THEN CAME CROMWELL 

Elizabeth's worthy work of introducing Brit- 
ish civilization to the benighted Irish met with 
marked success. 

But the good work probably reached its cli- 
max under Cromwell, who scourged, tortured 
and butchered the population, and drenched the 
land in a deluge of blood. 

For Cromwell, the ground was well prepared. 
Five Northern Counties had been depopulated 
thirty years before, to make room for James's 
Scotchmen. The wretched Irish survivors of the 
depopulation campaign, those who had been 
robbed of their houses and lands, and bereaved 
o'i kith and kin, were hunted like animals in the 
hills to which they had fled. On the 23rd of 
Oct. 1641 there was a general rising of the hunt- 
ed ones. They swooped back over the lands 
where their plunderers had been fattening in ease 
and plenty. England was aroused by frightful 
reports of a general massacre of almost all the 
British in Ireland! 



AND THEN CAME CROMWELL 

It would not have been strange if these poor 
wretches — plundered, harried, hounded, and driv- 
en to frenzy — had wreaked terrible vengeance 
on, and exterminated, their merciless tyrants. 
But the Protestant Minister, Rev. Ferdinand 
Warner in his ^'History of the Irish Rebellion," 
written a few years after the event, says, "It is 
easy enough to demonstrate the falsehood of the 
relation of every English historian of the re- 
bellion." And another celebrated Protestant 
historian, Dr. Taylor, in his "Civil Wars of Ire- 
land," says, "The Irish massacre of 1641 has 
been a phrase so often repeated, even in books 
of education, that one can scarcely conceal his 
surprise when he learns that the tale is apocryp- 
hal as the wildest fiction of romance." He says, 
"There were crimes committed owing to the 
wickedness of particular men. But it is only 
fair to add that all atrocities were not only dis- 
couraged, but punished, by the Irish nobility and 
gentry." 

To suppress this rebellion the whole pack of 
England's carefully nurtured savageries, and 
best trained savages, were unleashed against 
Ireland. 

Sir Charles Coote typical of the English gen- 
erals in this war employed rack, and dungeon 



IRELAND'S CASE 

and roasting to death for appeasing of the tur- 
bulent natives. He stopped at nothing — even 
hanging w^omen with child. 

Lord Clarendon in his narrative of the events 
of the time records, how, after Coote plundered 
and burned the town of Clontarf, he massacred 
townspeople, men and women, ''and three suck- 
ling infants." And in that same week, says 
Clarendon, men, women and children of the vil- 
lage of Bullock frightened of the fate of Clon- 
tarf, went to sea to shun the fury of the soldiers 
who came from Dublin under Colonel Clifford, 
''Being pursued by the soldiers in boats and 
overtaken, they were all thrown overboard." 

Coote and Clifford were not better or worse 
than the average of the pacifiers of Ireland. I 
could quote here more instances of the blood- 
freezing kind than would fill a large book. But 
for my purpose one or two samples are as good 
as a thousand. Castlehaven sets down one in- 
cident characteristic of the humanity of the Eng- 
lish troopers. He tells how Sir Arthur Loftus, 
Governor of Naas, marched out with a party of 
horse, and being joined by a party sent by Or- 
mond from Dublin, "They both together killed 
such of the Irish as they met .... but th^ 
most considerable slaughter occurred in a g.-ai 



AND THEN CAME CROMWELL 

strait of furze, situated on a hill, where the peo- 
ple of several villages had fled for shelter." Sir 
Arthur surrounded the hill, fired the furze, and 
with the points of swords, drove back into the 
flames the burning men, women and children 
who tried to emerge — till the last child was burn- 
ed to a crisp. Says Castlehaven in his Memoirs, 
"I saw the bodies — and the furze still burning." 
For it should be particularly noted that the 
suckling infant aroused in the brave Britons the 
same noble, blood-thirst that did the fighting 
rebel. The butchering of infants was more dili- 
gently attended to during the Cromwellian per- 
iod, than in any previous or subsequent English 
excursion through Ireland. It is matter of rec- 
ord that in the presence, and with the tolera- 
tion, of their officers — in at least one case with 
the hearty approval of a leader — the common 
soldiers engaged in the sport of tossing Irish 
babes upon their spears. A noted old English 
historian, Dr. Nalson, in his account of the 
rebellion states (Introduction to his Second Vol- 
ume) "I have heard a relation of my own, who 
was a captain in that service (in Ireland), relate 
that .... little children were promiscuously 
sufferers with the guilty, and that when anyone 
who had some grains of compassion repreh^nd^ 



IRELAND'S CASE 

the soldiers for this unchristian inhumanity, they 
would scoffingly reply 'Why? nits will be lice!' 
and so despatch them." 

In countering this rebellion the Britsh opened 
the game with the fearful County Antrim horror 
known to history as the Massacre of Island 
Magee — where, after murdering a multitude in 
b'd, the women and children, screaming and 
begging for mercy, were driven before the troops' 
goading bayonets to the terrible Gobbins clififs — 
and thrown over the cliffs to fearful death below! 

The singer of Ireland's woes and Ireland's joys, 
Ethna Carbery, sang a fierce song of this terrible 
deed— BRIAN BOY MAGEE. 

I am Brian Boy Magee — 
My Father was Eoghain Ban — 
I was wakened from happy dreams 
By the shouts of my startled clan; 
And I saw through the leaping glare 
That marked where our homestead stood. 
My mother swing by her hair — 
And my brothers lie in their blood. 

In the creepy cold of the night 
The pitiless wolves came down — 
Scotch troops from that Castle grim 
Guarding Knockfergus Town; 



AND THEN CAME CROMWELL 

And they hacked and lashed and hewed, 
With musket and rope and sword, 
Till my murdered kin lay thick, 
In pools, by the Slaughter Ford! 

I fought by my father's side, 
And when we were fighting sore 
We saw a line of their steel 
With our shrieking women before ; 
The red-coats drove them on 
To the verge of the Gobbins gray. 
Hurried them — God, the sight! 
As the sea foamed up for its prey. 

Oh, tall were the Gobbin cliffs, 
And sharp were the rocks, my woe ! 
And tender the limbs that met 
Such terrible death below; 
Mother and babe and maid 
They clutched at the empty air. 
With eyeballs widened in fright. 
That hour of despair. 

(Sleep soft in your heaving bed, 
O little fair love of my heart! 
The bitter oath I have sworn 
Shall be of my life a part; 

39 



IRELAND'S CASE 

And for every piteous prayer 
You prayed on your way to die, 
May I hear an enemy plead, 
While I laugh and deny.) 

In the dawn that was gold and red, 
Ay, red as the blood-choked stream, 
I crept to the perilous brink — 
Great Christ ! was the night a dream ? 
In all the Island of Gloom 
I only had life that day — 
Death covered the green hill-sides, 
And tossed in the Bay. 

I have vowed by the pride of my sires — 
By my mother's wandering ghost — 
By my kinsfolk's shattered bones 
Hurled on the cruel coast — 
By the sweet dead face of my love, 
And the wound in her gentle breast- 
To follow that murderous band, 
A sleuth-hound who knows no rest. 

I shall go to Phelim O'Neill 
With my sorrowful tale, and crave 
A blue-bright blade of Spain, 
In the ranks of his soldiers brave, 

40 



AND THEN CAME CROMWELL 

And God grant me the strength to wield 

That shining avenger well — ■ 
When the Gael shall sweep his foe 
Through the yawning gates of Hell. 

I am Brian Boy Mageel 

And my creed is a creed of hate; 

Love, Peace, I have cast aside — 

But Vengeance, Vengeance, I wait! 

Till I pay back the four-fold debt 

For the horrors I witnessed there, 

When my brothers moaned in their blood. 

And my mother swung by her hair. 

In 1644 the British Parliament ordered no 
quarter to Irish troops in Britain. Ormond shipt 
150 Royalists from Galway to Bristol, under Wil- 
ioughby. Captain Swanley seized the ship, 
picked out from amongst the troops seventy 
whom he considered to be Irish and threw them 
overboard. The Journal of the English House 
of Commons for June of that year records that 
"Captain Swanley was called into the House of 
Commons and thanks given to him for his good 
service, and a chain of gold of two hundred 
pounds in value." 

In pursuance of the same admirable policy, 
Napier in his "Life of Montrose" says that, in 

4* 



IRELAND'S CASE 

Scotland, in one day, eighty Irish women and 
children were thrown over a bridge, and 
drowned. 

Clarendon tells that the Earl of Warwick when 
he captured Irish frigates, used to tie the Irish 
sailors back to back, and fling them into the sea. 

So, a sympathetic atmosphere had been created 
for Cromwell's coming. And Cromwell quickly 
demonstrated that he deserved such preparation. 

In Wexford town alone, although negotiations 
for surrender had begun, Cromwell slew two 
thousand. Lingard in his "History of Eng- 
land" says, "Wexford was abandoned to the 
mercy of the assailants. The tragedy recently 
enacted at Drogheda was renewed. No distinc- 
tion was made between the defenceless inhabi- 
tants and the armed soldiers, nor could the 
shrieks and prayers of three hundred females 
who had gathered round the great Cross in the 
market-place, preserve them from the swords 
of these ruthless barbarians." 

Cromwell in explaining the matter to the com- 
plete satisfaction of his saintly self and the pious 
English nation, wrote, that he "thought it not 
right or good to restrain off the soldiers from 
their right of pillage, nor from doing execution 
on the enem;y" (From "Cromwell's Letters.") 

4a 



AND THEN CAME CROMWELL 

Though, after the sack of Drogheda, he prob- 
ably could not surpass himself. In the five days 
massacre at Drogheda only thirty men out of 
a garrison of three thousand escaped the sword. 
And it is impossible to compute what other thou- 
sands, of non-combatants, men, women and chil- 
dren, were butchered. In the vaults, underneath 
the church, a great number of the finest women 
or the city sought refuge. But hardly one, if 
one, even of these, was left to tell the awful 
tale of unspeakable outrage and murder. 

And of all the men, women and children who 
had taken refuge in the church tower, none 
escaped. In the attack upon the church tower, 
the English soldiers made good use again of a 
device which they always practised when oppor- 
tunity ofiFered. They picked up children 
and carried them in front of them as bucklers. 

Arthur Wood the Historian of Oxford, gives 
us a narrative compiled from the account of his 
bjother who was an officer in Cromwell's army, 
and who had been through the siege and sack of 
Drogheda — a narrative that throws interesting 
sidelight upon the Christian methods of the Eng- 
lish army, and the quaint point of view of the 
most cultured of them. Wood's narrative says, 
''Each of the assailants would take up a child 

43 



IRELAND^ CASE 

and use it as a buckler of defence to Iceep lilfli 

from being shot or brained. After they had 
killed all in the church they went into the vaults 
underneath, where all the choicest of women and 
ladies had hid themselves. One of these, a most 
handsome virgin, arrayed in costly and gorgeous 
apparel, knelt down to Wood with tears, and 
prayers, begging for her life, and being stricken 
with a profound pity, he did take her under his 
arm for protection, and went with her out of the 
church with intention to put her over the works, 
to shift for herself. But a soldier, perceiving his 
intention, ran his sword through her, whereupon 
Mr. Wood, seeing her gasping, took away her 
money, jewels etc., and flung her down over the 
works." The instincts of the English gentleman 
burst through the Christian crust in Mr. Wood. 
But hearken to how one of the greatest of Eng- 
lish Christians — ^perhaps the shining light of 
English Puritanism — at one stroke, both haloes 
his crime and honors God by giving God partner- 
ship with him in his most demoniac work. In 
his despatch to the Speaker of the House of Com- 
mons, after Drogheda, Cromwell says, "It has 
pleased God to bless our endeavor at Drogheda 
. . . the enemy were about 3,000 strong in th<i 
town. I believe we put to the sword the wboUi 

44 



AND TEtEN CAME CiROMWELi:. 

number. -.] • . This hath been a marvelous great 
mercy. , . , I wish that all honest hearts may 
give the glory of this to God alone, to whom 
indeed the praise of this mercy belongs." And 
again this shining light of Christianity says, "In 
this very place (St. Peter's Church), lOO of them 
were put to the sword, fleeing thither for safety. 
. . . And now give me leave to say how this 
work was wrought. It was set upon some of our 
hearts that a great thing should be done, not by 
power or might, but by the spirit of God. And is 
it not so clearly?" 

The Englishman's intimacy with, and obedi- 
ence to, the spirit of God, throughout England's 
history in Ireland, enables him always to speak 
with authority upon the subject. And the spirit 
of God, we may expect, is exalted, when the 
Englishman, with characteristic generosity 
drapes it with his own character. 

The English Parliament, on October 2, 1649, 
appointed a Thanksgiving Day for the triumph 
at Drogheda, and put upon record — "That the 
House does approve of the execution done at 
Drogheda, as an act both of justice to them 
(the butchered ones) and mercy to others who 
may be warned by it." 

Carte in his **Life of Ormond" records that at 



IRELAND'S CAS:E 

Drogheda, the offer to surrender, and request for 
quarter, had been made before the final assault 
and massacre. 

The holy spirit that generally moved Britain 
in this war is exemplified by a pamphlet pub- 
lished in London at the height of the civiliz- 
ing demonstration in Ireland. The pam- 
phlet is represented as being published "by J. D. 
and R. L at the sign of the Bible in Popes head 
Alley, 1647." I^ the course of the pamphlet the 
writer says, "I beg upon my hands and knees 
ihat the expedition against them (the Irish) be 
undertaken while the hearts and hands of our 
soldiery are hot ; to whome, I will be bold to say, 
briefly: happy be he that shall reward them as 
they served us, and cursed be he who shall do 
the work of the Lord negligently. Cursed be he 
who holdeth back the sword from blood: yea 
cursed be he that maketh not the sword stark 
drunk with Irish blood; who doth not recom- 
pense them double for their treachery to the Eng- 
lish ; but maketh them in heaps on heaps, and 
their country the dwelling place of dragons — 
an astonishment for nations. Let not that eye 
look for pity, nor hand be spared, that pities or 
spares them ; and let him be cursed that curseth 
them not bitterly." 



AND THEN CAME CROMWELL 

A truly sweet soul was the Lord's Anointed 
who framed this delicate flower of prayer. 

A little illustrative incident from Carte's Life 
of Ormond may here be set down to show how 
the "treacherous Irish" retaliated. Carte tells 
how St. Leger when marching across the coun- 
try, "slaughtered men, women and children" — 
the usual thing — finally murdered one, Philip 
Ryan, whose infuriated relatives retaliated in 
kind upon several of the British settlers. Carte 
says "All the rest of the English were saved by the 
inhabitants of that place: their houses and goods 
safely returned to them. Dr. Saml. Pullen, Prot- 
estant Chancellor of Cashel, and the Dean of 
Clonfert with his wife and children, were pre- 
served by Father James Saul, a Jesuit. Several 
other Romish priests distinguished themselves 
by their endeavors to save the English. The 
English thus preserved were, according to their 
desires, safely conducted to the County 
Cork, by a guard of the Irish inhabitants of 
Cashel." 

And how the Catholics retaliated on their 
persecutors in Ireland in the century before, is 
witnessed by the Protestant, William Parnell, in 
his "Historical Apology" (1807). When in the 
rdign of Mary, the Catholics were in the aScen- 

47 



IRELAND'S CASE 

dancy, "They entertained no resentment for the 
past/' Parnell testifies: "they laid no plans for 
future domination. Such was the general spirit 
of toleration that many English families, friends 
of the Reformation, took refuge in Ireland, and 
there enjoyed their opinions and worship without 
molestation." 

So much for the Irish brand of retaliation as 
opposed to the London sample. 

Half a century ere Cromwell, the conquest of 
Ireland had been technically completed. The 
Cromwellian Wars — like many other wars which 
continued to shake the Island — were merely civil- 
izing demonstrations. 

Cromwell sent twenty thousand Irish boys 
and girls into slavery in the Virginian Colonies 
and the West Indies. (On one or two of the 
Islands of the West Indies, up to nearly a cen- 
tury ago, it is related, the negroes still spoke 
Gaelic.) The merchants of Bristol, ever enter- 
prising, and prompt to profit by a good opening, 
did a brisk business in Irish slaves then and 
later for the transatlantic markets — entering into 
formal legal contracts for the worthy purpose. 

Prendergast in his Cromwellian Settlement of 
Ireland names four Bristol merchants who were 
the most active of the slave trading agents. For 

48 



AND THEN CAME CROMWELL 

illustrating the formal legal way in which the 
horror was commercialized Prendergast quotes 
**one instance out of many" — the case of Captain 
John Vernon, who as agent of the English Com- 
missioners who then governed Ireland, con- 
tracted with Messrs. Sellick and Leader of Bris- 
tol "under his hand, of date 14th September, 
1653," to supply them with two hundred and 
fifty women of the Irish nation above twelve and 
under forty-five years of age. Also three hun- 
dred men between twelve years and forty-five 
years of age. 

On the troopers, the camp followers, the Eng- 
lish friends, and London financiers, of the Crom- 
wellian expedition — for it was financed by spec- 
ulators in legal, regular way — was bestowed all 
of the richest of the lands in the East and South. 
To such of the Irish as escaped butchery and 
slavery, Cromwell gave the choice of "Hell or 
Connaught"— Connaught being the Western, the 
wildest and most barren province of Ireland. 

After the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland, 
the official records (May, 1563) state "The starv- 
ing multitude are feeding on carrion and weeds 
on the highways, and many times orphans are 
found exposed and some of them fed upon by 

49 



IRELAND'S CASE 

ravening wolves, and other birds and beasts of 
prey." 

Thirty thousand Irishmen escaped with their 
lives to Europe — to all corners of which they 
wandered — and in all corners of which they 
with their Irish brilliancy, soon made themselves 
famed. One historian says, "They became Chan- 
cellors of Universities, professors, and high of- 
ficials in every European state. A Kerryman was 
physician to Sobieski,, King of Poland, A Kerry- 
man was confessor to the Queen of Portugal, and 
was sent by the King on an embassy to Louis 
the Fourteenth. A Donegal man named 
O'Glacan was physician and Privy Chancello" 
to the King of France, and a very famed pro 
fessor of medicine in the Universities of Tolouse 
and Bologna." 

"There wasn't a country in Europe and not 
an occupation where Irishmen were not in the 
first rank — as Fieldmarshals, Admirals, Ambas- 
sadors, Prime Ministers, Scholars, Physicians, 
Merchants, Soldiers, and Founders of mining in- 
dustry." 

Irish scholars and soldiers, the Wild Geese, 
continued streaming from Ireland to the Con- 
tinent over more than one hundred years — and 
during the next century and a half were making 

50 



AND THEN CAME CROMWELL 

their mark throughout Europe. Read O'Callag- 
han's History of the Irish Brigade in the service 
of France for much that is absorbingly interest- 
ing. 

From 1690 to 1745 it is recorded that almost 
half a million Irish soldiers died for France. But 
before they died they wrote their name and Ire- 
land's name, in glory, on many famous battlefields 
— at Steinkirk, at Landen, at Blenheim, at Spires, 
at Fontenoy the Glorious where they proved 
themselves the saviours of France, and on a score 
of other fields. 

"On far foreign fields, from Dunkirk to Belgrade, 
Lie the soldiers and chiefs of the Irish Brigade." 

In the middle of the eighteenth century Naples 
had an Irish regiment. 

There were five Irish regiments with Spain. 
At Melazzo in Sicily, the Irish troops turned 
the tide of war when the Spaniards were sur- 
prised by the Germans — ^and saved the Span- 
iards. 

The Irish Admiral, Cammock, who was the 
leading man in the Spanish Government in the 
sixties of the eighteenth century, had been an 
ambassador to London. 

5» 



IRELAND'S CASE 

Spain had noted generals, O'Mahoney, O'Don- 
nell, O'Gara, O'Reilly, O'Neill. 

When Cremona was surprised by Eugene and 
the Imperial troops, the Irish, tumbling out of 
bed and fighting in their shirts, recovered the 
City. 

Lecky says, "The Austrian, army was crowded 
with Irish officers and soldiers." 

The noble family of the Taafifes of Austri? 
were Irish — and down to the present day kept 
up their Irish affiliations. The Duke of Tetuan, 
who was Spanish Minister of War during the 
Spanish-American War, is one of the Donegal 
O'Donnells who have been for centuries in Spain. 
He still maintains his affiliations with Donegal. 

Lally of the Brigade who distinguished him- 
self at Fontenoy and elsewhere, ambitioned the 
conquest of India. 

Tyrconnel was French ambassador to Berlin. 
Lacey was Spanish ambassador to Stockholm. 
And O'Mahoney was ambassador to Vienna. In 
recent days Marshal MacMahon was President 
of France. 

The Dillons were high in the French army. 
And one of the family was Bishop of Toulouse. 

One of the foremost Austrian generals during 
the Seven Years' War was the Irishman, Browne. 



AND THEN CAME CROMWELL 

Another Browne, cousin to General Browne, of 
Austria, was Fieldmarshal in the Russian ser- 
vice, and became Governor of Riga. O'Brien it 
was who founded and built up the Russian navy. 
Peter Lacey was Russian Field Marshal and was 
the chief man in organizing the army of Peter 
the Great. 

The Laceys achieved great fame in Spain and 
Austria, as well as in Russia. 

While Ireland groaned through her long and 
terrible night of agony, and the Irish at home 
were as the wild beasts, Europe, throughout its 
length and breadth, scintillated with the bril- 
liancy of the brilliant banished children of Inis- 
fail, and their children, and children's children. 

These had escaped the blessings of English 
civilization. 



CHAPTER IV. 
ENGLAND FOSTERS IRISH INDUSTRIES 

It was not only about Ireland's morality and 
politics that England gravely concerned herself. 
Ireland's industries, trade and commerce, needed 
serious looking after by the protector. 

From very remote days, as testified both by 
ancient history and ancient legend, the natives of 
this Island adventured much upon sea. 

In the early centuries of the Christian Era 
the highly civilized Celt turned to trade and com- 
merce — probably stimulated thereto by the 
Phoenicians who carried on a large commercial 
intercourse with Ireland. The early Irish were 
famous for their excellence in the arts and crafts 
— particularly for their wonderfully beautiful 
work in metals — in bronze, silver and gold. A 
hundred hills and bogs in Ireland constantly 
yield up testimony to this — if we discarded the 
testimony of history, story and poem. 

By the beginning of the Middle Ages, the trade 
of Ireland with the Continent of Europe was im- 
portant — ^and Irish ships seem to have been sail- 

54 



ENGLAND FOSTERS IRISH INDUSTiUES 

ing to most of the leading ports of the Con- 
tinent. Irish merchants were well-known in the 
great Continental markets. And Irish money 

commanded universal credit. 

This condition of things naturally did not suit 
Ireland's protector — her commercial rival — Eng- 
land. So at an early period she began to pro- 
tect Irish industry — by trying to keep it at home. 
It is interesting to follow for a century or two 
the means adopted for this worthy object. 

In 1339 England appointed an admiral whose 
duty was to stop traffic between Ireland and the 
Continent. He must have been but indifferently 
successful ; for, a little more than a century later, 
Edward the Fourth deplores the prosperity of 
Ireland's trade, and he orders (in 1465) that since 
the fishing vessels from the Continent helped 
out the traffic with Ireland, these vessels should 
not henceforth fish in Irish waters without an 
English permit. 

And since even this did not stop the stubborn 
Irish, in 1494 an English law is enacted prohibit- 
ing the Irish from exporting any industrial pro- 
duct, except with English permit, and throup^h 
ar English port, after paying English fees. 

This handicap, too, failed. For, we find Eng- 
lish merchants in 1548, unofficially taking a hand 

55 



IRELAND'S CASE 

at trying to end the traffic — ^by fitting out 
armed vessels to attack and plunder the trading 
ships between Ireland and the Continent — com- 
mercialized piracy. 

But official piracy had to be fallen back upon. 
Still twenty years later, Elizabeth ordered the 
seizure of the whole Continental commerce of 
Munster — much more than half of the trade of 
the Island. And in 1571 she ordered that no 
cloth or stuff made in Ireland, should be exported 
even to England, except by an Englishman in 
Ireland, or by a merchant approved by the Gov- 
ernment. (Nearly thirty years before, her res- 
pected, much married father, Henry of blessed 
memory, had forbidden Irish cloths to be ex- 
ported from Galway). 

And Irish trade was attacked from yet another 
angle. At the same time that the altruistic ad- 
miral was appointed, Irish coinage, was, by law, 
forbidden to be received in England. However, 
Irish merchants and Irish money had such worthy 
repute that not only did they still succeed with 
it on the Continent but, one hundred years later, 
Irish coinage had to be prohibited again in Eng- 
land. That was in 1447. 

In 1477, after imprisoning some Irish mer- 
chants who traded with Irish money in England, 

56 



ENGLAND FOSTERS IRISH INDUSTRIES 

Ireland's protectors adopted a radical reform by 
introducing into Ireland an English coinage de- 
based twenty-five per cent, below the English 
standard — and by law establishing it as the Irish 
currency. 

Yet we are told that Irish credit on the Con- 
tinent was so good that, the "illegal" Irish coin- 
age still continued to pass there. And the Irish 
at home, with their usual perversity, seemed to 
have preferred the full value Irish coinage to the 
three-quarter value English coinage — for, seventy 
years later (in 1549) the refusal of an Irishman 
in Ireland to accept the debased English coin- 
age at its face value was decreed an act of trea- 
son. An immediate reason for this act was, that 
the English soldiers in Ireland, being paid with 
the debased brand of English coinage, found 
"nothing doing" when they tendered their coin 
for Irish products. 

By reason of the big Continental trade the 
shipping industry had in itself become an impor- 
tant one in Ireland. Hence it was advisable to 
extinguish it. So, in 1663 the law prohibited the 
use of all foreign going ships except such as were 
built in England, manned by Englishmen, and 
sailing from English ports. 

The Navigation Act of 1637 had already pro- 

57 



IRELAND'S CASS 

vidcd that Irish ships must clear from English 
ports for foreign trade. After the Act of 1663 
was passed, it was found that Irish merchants 
even at these heavy disadvantages, had begun to 
develop direct trade with the English Colonies. 
So this was stopped. And it was then tried to 
enact that no boats could even fish upon the 
Irish shore except boats built and manned by 
Englishmen. Anyhow the Irish ship-building 
sore was healed — ^by the effective method of re- 
moving it altogether. 

The foreigner who knows not the way of Eng- 
land with Ireland, will pause to ask himself if all 
this is joke. It is a very grim joke. But dear 
foreign reader, be not discouraged — there's worse 
to come. Study Ireland's woolen joke. 

The manufacture of cloths, more especially 
woolens, had become in these centuries, a great 
Irish industry. In the Continental markets, and 
even in the British, Irish woolens were in great 
demand. Consequently this trade should be 
stopped. Though, as usual, it took a long- time 
to convince the pig-headed people who inhabited 
Ireland that it was for their benefit to stop it. 
The good work was, for mother England, a 
tedious and thankless task. But England works 
not for thanks. Her work is altruistic ever. 

S8 



ENGLAND POSTERS IRISH INDUSTRIES 

In 1571, Elizabeth had begun the useful work 
by discouraging the cloth trade. But half a cen- 
tury later the good Lord Strafford, then Lord 
Lieutenant of Ireland, is begging for a little more 
discouragement. In 1634, he writes to Charles 
the First, **That all wisdom advises to keep this 
(Irish) Kingdom as much subordinate and de- 
pendent on England as possible; and holding 
them from the manufacture of wool (which un- 
less otherwise directed, I shall by all means dis- 
courage), and then enforcing them to fetch their 
cloth from thence, how can they depart from us 
without nakedness and beggary?*' Dear Mother 
England, how closely Ireland should cling to, 
and how dearly Ireland should love you! 

But it was not until 1660 that woolen goods 
were, by law, forbidden to be exported from Ire- 
land to England. Then the Irish thought to ex- 
port their raw wool. This must be discouraged. 
So, in 1669, Ireland was prohibited from export- 
ing her wool to England. 

But there was no reason why, even when Irish 
wool was kept at home, England might not 
make direct profit out of it there — and also help 
her own merchants, by enabling them to under- 
sell the Irish, in their own Irish markets. So, 
later, Ireland was asked to send her «hfep to 

59 



IRELAND'S CASE 

English ports for shearing — ^and for oflScial fix- 
ing of the price of Irish wool. 

This was good. But there was better to come. 
In 1673, Sir William Temple (by request of Vice- 
roy Essex) proposed that the Irish would act 
wisely in giving up altogether the manufacture of 
wool (even for home use), because "it tended to 
interfere prejudicially with the English woolen 
tiade." This is the same English statesman and 
Irish protector who pointedly and pithily put 
the maxim which England has always observed 
in protecting Ireland, and fostering Irish wel- 
fare — "Regard must be had" said Sir William 
Temple "to those points wherein the trade of Ire- 
land comes to interfere with that of England, in 
which case Irish trade ought to be declined so as 
to give way to the trade of England." The es- 
sence of the maxim, though, was then old. Sir 
Humphrey Gilbert in the sixteenth century had 
said, "The trade of Ireland with Spain must be 
destroyed and secured to England." 

Now Ireland was almost completely cured of 
the bad habit of exporting woolens to her mas- 
ter's detriment. Only, a little trace of the habit 
still lingered. While the British Colonies (by 
an oversight) had been left open to her, she con- 
tinued exporting to them. This needed attention. 



ENGLAND FOSTERS IRISH INDUSTRIES 

Accordingly in 1697 an act was introduced to pro- 
hibit Ireland from sending out any of her wool- 
en manufactures — to any place. That should 
finally fix her. 

But, the Old England conscience yet scrupled 
that it had not fully done its duty by its stepchild. 
For though Ireland had ceased to interfere with 
the English market throughout the rest of the 
world, it was still wilfully making and wearing 
its own woolens — to the criminal detriment of 
English trade in Ireland. So, in 1698 a final step 
was taken. On June 9 of that year both of the 
English Houses of Parliament addressed King 
William (of Glorious, Pious and Immortal Me- 
mory) beseeching him to chide his Irish subjects 
for that — in the language of the House of Lords, 
''The growth of the woolen manufactures there 
hath long and will be ever looked upon with great 
jealousy by all your subjects of this kingdom, 
and if not timely remedied may occasion very 
strict laws totally to prohibit and suppress same." 
The impending punishment for continued wil- 
fullness on the part of the naughty Irish child, 
was going to give the noble lords more pain than 
it would the child — ^which was being punished for 
its own good. 

Axwi the Commons in the course of their ad- 



IRELAND'S CASE 

dress say, "And therefore we cannot without 
trouble observe that Ireland which is dependent 
on, and protected by, England, in the enjoyment 
of all they have" — that is so decidedly good that 
we must repeat it — "that Ireland which is de- 
pendent on, and protected by, England in the 
enjoyment of all they have, should of late apply 
itself to the woolen manufacture, to the great 
prejudice of the trade of this kingdom . . , 
make it your royal care, and enjoin all those 
whom you employ in Ireland to make it their 
care, and use their utmost diligence, to hinder the 
export of wool from Ireland, except to be im- 
ported hither, and for discouraging the woolen 
manufacture of Ireland." And in token of their 
solicitude for the country which was "protected 
by England in the enjoyment of all that they 
have" they suggested that Irishmen should turn 
to making hemp and linen — which England had 
little means of making — and which, more betoken, 
Ireland then had less means of making. 

King William answered his faithful Lords and 
Commons, "I shall do all that in my power lies 
to discourage the manufacture of woolens in Ire- 
land." And the King was this time as good as 
his word (despite the scandalous slanders of 
X^imerick men). In this year of 1698 he signed 



ENGLAND FOSTERS IRISH INDUSTRIES 

an act to the effect that because these manu- 
factures are daily increasing in Ireland (disas- 
trous to relate!), the exports of wool and woolen 
manufactured articles from Ireland, should be 
forbidden under pain of forfeiture cf the goods, 
and ships that carried them, and five hundred 
pounds fine. It needs an Englishman's sublimity 
of mind to comprehend the enormity ol the Irisn 
crime, and the deep degradation of Irish 
criminals, which permitted the manufactures of 
their country '*daily to increase" — to such a 
grievous extent that their protectors had to step 
in and penalize the crime — and root it out. 

It is worth remembering that though the mere 
Irish in Ireland were the workers, earning a sub- 
sistence at the trade, it was now almost entirely 
the Anglo-Irish, the purely British-blooded peo- 
ple of the Island who were the manufacturers, 
the traders, the capitalists. They, having had 
the misfortune to he born and to be living in Ire- 
land, were penalized and striven to be crushed 
out by their own kin in the holy motherland be- 
yond the Irish Sea. That they richly deserved, 
however, to be throttled and kicked, is proven 
by the fact that they, servile creatures, acting on 
the behest of William and their kin beyond the 
water, did, on September, 1698, actually pass in 

6j 



IRELAND'S CASE 

their own House of Parliament (from which the 
real Irish were carefully excluded) an act laying 
prohibitory duties on their own woolen manufac- 
tures I In this connection it is worth comparing 
the spinelessness of the Anglo-Irish in 1698 with 
the spinefulness of their cousins in America, three 
quarters of a century later. 

Except for a few Uttle items such as waddings 
which were overlooked in the act of William the 
Third — but carefully attended to by his succes- 
sors — the great Irish woolen manufacture was 
now extinguished forever. The Irish woolen 
comedy was ended. 

For a long time after this destruction of one 
of the country's chief supports, the economic 
conditions in Ireland were terrible. Swift, who 
had stated that "since Scripture says oppression 
makes a wise man mad, therefore, consequently 
speaking, the reason that some men in Ireland 
are not mad is because they are not wise" — he. 
Swift, thus describes the condition to which Ire- 
land was brought, by the suppression of the wool- 
en trade — "The old and sick are dying and rotting 
by cold and famine, and filth and vermin. The 
younger laborers cannot get work, and pine away 
for want of nourishment to such a degree that 
if at any time they are accidently hired to com- 



ENGLAND FOSTERS IRISH INDUSTRIES 

mence labor, they have not the strength to per- 
form it/' 

And the Protestant Bishop Nicholson who was 
transferred to Derry from Carlisle, wrote ''Never 
even in Picardy, Westphalia or Scotland, did I 
behold such marks of hunger and want as ap- 
peared in the countenances of most of the poor 
creatures met with on the road. In Donegal, in 
bad seasons, the cattle are bled and the blood 
boiled with sorrel." 

Both Irish and English writers of this period 
draw fearful pictures of Irish suffering and Irish 
starvation, resulting from the abolition of her 
woolen manufactures. 

But, of course, they had hemp and linen manu- 
factures to fall back upon — not to mention cot- 
ton, fvo, they turned their attention to these. 
But were not long at them till England got con- 
cerned that they were in danger of making a suc- 
cess of them. 

So, with the thoroughness of a real mistress, she 
attended to this. Twenty five per cent, duty was 
first put upon Irish cotton imported into Eng- 
land. And then, in the reign of George the First, 
the inhabitants of Great Britain were forbidden to 
wear any cotton other than of British manufac- 

6s 



IRELAND'S CASE 

ture. Which ended the brief cotton comedy in 
Ireland. 

As for the linen, it began receiving England's 
attention immediately after the woolens were 
disposed of. As early as 1705, the export of linen 
from Ireland to the British Colonies was for- 
bidden — except for the coarsest kinds of undyed 
Imens. Then the British Parliament put duties 
and prohibitions upon Irish linen manufacturers 
--and at the same time, granted bounties to Eng- 
lish and Scotch manufacturers — in order to cure 
Irishmen of the trade for promise of which Ire- 
land had permitted herself to be robbed of her 
woolen manufacture. 

The Irish linens being excluded from England 
by the imposition of a heavy duty, the foreign 
Irish linen trade was soon safely ruined also. 
But English attention to the trade followed and 
sought it out even within the four seas of Ire- 
land. When Crommelin, the Hugenot, who had 
materially helped to build up the linen trade in 
Ulster, tried to spread the manufacture into Lein- 
stor, we are told that the fiercest English opposi- 
tion blazed up. 

Edmund Burke challenged the English Gov- 
ernment for its breach of faith on the linen prop- 
osition. And the servile Irish (Anglo-Irish) Par- 



ENGLAND FOSTERS IRISH INDUSTRIES 

liament in 1774 addressed Harwood, the Lord 
Lieutenant on the subject of the linen ruin, say- 
ing, "The result is the ruin of Ulster and the flight 
of the Protestant population to America." So, 
it was the ruin of the linen trade under Eng- 
land's '^protecting them in the enjoyment of all 
they have" that helped to give to America her so- 
called Scotch-Irish population. 

'* Whoever," said Swift, "travels in this land 
and observes the face of nature, and contrasts it 
with the faces and dwellings of the natives, 
hardly thinks himself in a land where law, re- 
ligion, or common humanity is professed." 

The linen trade was now well in hand. So let 
us follow up another Irish comedy. 

From an early period the Irish had a large 
trade ia the export of cattle to England. In 1665 
England tried to stop this trade^and finally did 
stop it in the reign of Charles the Second, when 
the importation of Irish cattle into England was, 
bv an act of Parliament, voted "a common nuis- 
ance" — and forbidden. 

-Carte in his "Life of Ormond" tells of the dis- 
astrous effect which these acts had upon Ireland. 
He says that horses went down in price from 
thirty shillings to one shilling. And beeves from 
fifty shillings to tenpence. 

67 



IRELAND'S CASE 

The resourceful Irish then began killing the 
cattle at home, and exporting the dead meat. 
Their equally resourceful protectors immediately 
countered with a law forbidding the import of 
beef into England. And to leave no little hole 
without a peg — they added pork and bacon for 
good measure. 

But the contrary Irish ferreted out a hole to 
get through. They developed dairying and began 
exporting butter and cheese, from Ireland. Their 
exasperated protectors had to go to the trouble 
of amending the prohibition laws — adding butter 
and cheese to the items which the Irish were in- 
\ited to keep at home. 

Then the Irish killed their cattle and horses 
for their hides, and began what soon proved to be 
a prosperous trade in leather — which was in de- 
mand not only in England, but on the Continent 
of Europe. 

Their vigilant English masters, however, soon 
came along with another prohibition bill, which 
put an end to that business. Before quitting 
the cattle drive, however, it is only fair to say 
that one of England's most representative com- 
mercial writers of the early eighteenth century, 
Davenant, pleaded that England should permit 

68 



ENGLAND FOSTERS IRISH INDUSTRIES 

Ireland to resume the cattle trade — because it 
would hold the Irish from manufactures! 

Ireland attempted to develop her tobacco in- 
dustry. But a law against its growth was passed 
in the reign of Charles the Second. And again, 
in 1831, under William the Fourth, it was enacted 
that any person found in possession of Irish- 
grown tobacco, should suffer a heavy penalty. So 
the tobacco trade was tenderly shown out. 

Ireland, in the latter part of the eighteenth 
century, began not only making her own glass, 
but also making glass for export. In the reign 
of George the Second, the Irish, by law, were 
forbidden to export glass, and also forbidden to 
import any glass other than that of English man- 
ufacture. So the glass industry was protected 
to extinction. 

Four and five centuries ago and upward, the 
Irish fisheries were the second in importance in 
Europe. Under careful English nursing they 
■"^'^'•e, a century and a half ago, brought to the 
vanishing point. But the independent Irish Par- 
liament at the end of the eighteenth century 
saved them. It subsidized and revived the Irish 
fisheries — till they were rivalling the British. A 
few years after the Union, in 1819, England with- 
drew the subsidy from the Irish fisheries — at the 

69 



IRELAND'S CASE 

same time confirming and augmenting the sub 
fiidies and grants to the British fishermen — with 
the result that, notwithstanding Ireland's pos- 
session of the longest coastline of almost any 
European country, it is now possessed of the mpst 
miserable fisheries. ",,.I .' 1 ,'^V :. 

Where 150,000 Irish fishermen in 27,000 Irish 
boats worked and thrived at the time that the 
English Parliament took away the subsidy in 
1819, only 20,000 Irish people get a wretched 
support from Irish fisheries today. The Brit- 
ish fisheries, three or four centuries ago, about 
equalled the Irish. The fisheries of Britain 
today are valued at 9,000,000 pounds annually. 
The fisheries of Ireland are worth 300,000 pounds. 
The Irish fish were with typical British solicitude, 
protected into the British net. 

I have referred only to the leading Acts and 
devices for the suppression of Irish manufactures 
and Irish industries. What I have set down, 
however, is sufficient to show how England "pro- 
tected her beloved Irish subjects in the enjoyment 
of all they have" — how Ireland prospered under 
English Rule in a material way — and how Eng- 
land in her own kind way, took each little todd- 
ling Irish industry by the hand, led its childish 
footsteps to the brink of the bottomless pit, and 

70 



ENGLAND FOSTERS IRISH INDUSTRIES 

gave it a push — thus ending its troubles forever. 

Finally, the whole history of England's fos- 
tering of Irish industries may be shown in one 
illuminative sentence — When England, several 
^enturies ago, began the work of fostering Irish 
trade and industry/the commerce of Ireland was 
about equal to the commerce of Britain; in 1912, 
after several centuries assiduous English moth- 
ering of Irish industries, statistics showed that 
of the commerce of the foreign three kingdoms 
i.2 per cent, was in Irish hands, 98.8 per cent, was 
in the hands of Britain ! 

The reader who would like to have at his finger 
ends the whole history of Irish trade progress 
under mother England may burn and forget all 
the rest of this chapter if he only remember 
those few eloquent figures. 

Even the bitter, anti-Irish Froude, in his "Eng- 
lish in Ireland," is constrained to confess, "Eng- 
land governed Ireland for what she deemed her 
own interest, making her calculations on the 
gross balance of her trade ledgers, and leaving 
her moral obligations aside, as if right and wrong 
had been blotted out of the statute book of the 
Universe/' 

Edmund Burke, asked, "Is Ireland united to 
the crown of Great Britain for no purpose other 

71 



IRELAND'S CASE 

than to counteract the bounties of Providence? 
And in proportion as that bounty is generous that 
we should regard it as an evil which is to be dealt 
with by every sort of corrective?" 

Says Lecky, "It would be difficult in the whole 
range of history to find another instance in which 
such various and powerful agencies agreed to 
degrade the character, and blast the prosperity 
of a nation." 

And here endeth what will be considered by 
those who know not England's way with Ireland 
a wonderful chapter of Irish history — but quite 
common-place to those who have a bowing ac- 
quaintance with Irish history. 



CHAPTER V. 
THE PENAL LAWS 

But these Irish knaves, barbarous and per- 
verse, v^ere not yet domesticated to the satisfac- 
tion of the exacting Briton. 

A less persevering people than the English, 
less zealous in the service of God, might have 
given up these unregenerate heathens, in despair. 
But in doing his duty to God and man, nothing 
on earth or under the earth will deter the Briton. 

Since fire and sword failed to carry civilization 
home to the Irish savages, something newer and 
more effective must be tried. 

So the Penal Laws were invented. 

The great French jurist, Montesqueiu, says of 
the Irish Penal Laws: "This horrible code was 
conceived by devils, written in human blood, and 
registered in hell.'* 

Under the Penal Laws a Catholic (in Ireland 
synonymous with Irishman) was deprived of all 
rights of citizenship. 

He was forbidden to vote. 

He was forbidden to keep any arms for his 
piotection. 

73 



IRELAND'S CASE 

He was forbidden to enter any profession. 

He was forbidden to hold public office. 

He was forbidden to engage in trade or com- 
merce. 

He was forbidden to take a mortgage in security 
for a loan. 

He was forbidden to live in a walled town— 
or within five miles of a walled town. (The Eng- 
lish and Scotch settlers owned and occupied the 
towns and carried on the trade and commerce 
there. The Irishman was graciously permitted 
to come into the town during daylight — but had 
to depart for his own wilds before sunset— unaer 
risk of being shot at sight for transgressing this 
law. Even after the middle of the eighteenth 
century it was the boast of such cities as Ban- 
don in the South, and Derry in the North, that 
no Catholic was tolerated within their walls. 
And when John Wesley visited Enniskillen after 
the middle of the century, he found that city 
boasting of the same proud distinction). 

If any child of any Irish father adopted the 
English religion, that child could defy his father, 
become thereby his father's landlord, make his 
father support him in ease, and must inherit all 
oi his father's estate. 

If a man's wife chose tp turn Protestant, the 

7A 



THE PENAL LAWS 

Lord Chancellor provided for the wife, accord- 
ing to his pleasure from the property of her hus- 
band—and she became thereby the sole heir of 
all of her husband's property. 

No Catholic could inherit the land of a Protes- 
tant. 

It was illegal for a Catholic to purchase any 
kind. He could not inherit any land by will. No 
Catholic could receive an annuity. 

No Catholic could own a horse of greater val- 
ue than five pounds. If he found himself in pos- 
session of such an animal, the law compelled 
him, under severe penalty, to proceed at orice to 
the nearest Protestant and inform on himself. 

Catholics could only dwell on forfeited estates 
as laborers or cottiers. 

It was illegal for a Catholic to hold any land 
valued for more than thirty shillings a year. 

If, on his miserable patch of holding, a Catho- 
lic's profits exceeded one-third of his rent, all his 
land would, by law, go to the Protestant who dis- 
covered on him. 

Lecky says: "All real enterprise and industry 
among Catholic tenants were destroyed by laws 
which consigned them to utter ignorance, and still 
more by the law which placed strict bounds to 
progress by providing that if their profits ever 

75 



irei:and's case 

exceeded one-third of their rent the first Protes- 
tant who could prove that fact could take, their 
farm." 

As decent Protestants revolted at becoming in- 
formers it v^as enacted (by the Anglo-Irish Par- 
liament in 1705) "That the persecuting of, and 
informing against, papists, is an honorable serv- 
ice." (The renovirned quality of English humor 
charmingly exemplified by making dishonor 
honor, by Act of Parliament!) 

A Catholic father could not be guardian to, or 
have the tuition or custody of his own children, 
if they chose to turn Protestant. 

A Catholic was forbidden to educate his child. 
And he was forbidden to exercise his religion. 

If he sent his child abroad to be educated, all his 
property was thereby forfeited, and he himself 
outlawed. 

If by money help, or other help, he aided in 
sending the child of another abroad to be edu- 
cated, his property was confiscated and he him- 
self outlawed. 

If any child went abroad to be educated, the 
child's property, if it had any, or any property 
that it might ever after own, was thereby confis- 
cated — and the child was then and thenceforth 
placed outside all privileges of law, 

76 



THE PENAL LAWS 

A Penal Law passed as early as the reign of 
Elizabeth, and re-enacted as late as the reign of 
Anne, commanded all Irish people under penalty 
of fine or imprisonment to attend Protestant 
worship. 

Under the same law the leading Catholics in 
each town or district were appointed to see, and 
held responsible for, all of their fellow Catholics 
strictly observing the foregoing. They were to 
be the queen's bailiffs in bringing their heathen 
fellows to hear the truth — and the queen's in- 
formers upon all of their fellows who should turn 
a deaf ear to the truth. 

Both schoolmaster and priest were banned by 
law. Both of them hunted in the hills — tracked 
by blood hounds — and by human hounds infin- 
itely more beastly. 

There was a price upon the head of the school- 
master and of the priest — the same as on the 
head of a wolf. Though, frequently they were 
rated higher than the other pest. For instance, 
en June lO, 1567, Burton's Parliamentary Diary 
records the words of Major Morgan, M. P. for 
Wicklow — who was protesting in Parliament 
against striking more taxes on Ireland — "We 
have three beasts to destroy that lay burdens 
upon us; the first is a wolf upon whom we lay 

77 



IRELAND'S CASE 

five pounds; the second beast is a priest on whom 
we lay ten pounds — if he be eminent, more; the 
• third beast is a Tory on whom we lay twenty 
pounds." 

For, the price of priests fluctuated. Like every 
other commodity on the English market, it had, 
of course, to be governed by the law of supply 
and demand. And like most bad weeds the more 
the priest was rooted out the thicker he seemed 
to spring up again. When he was plentiful — 
which was usually the case — ^^the most that an 
honest, hard-working man could get for a priest 
was five pounds — at which the quotation usually 
stood. 

Aga*n, even when priests were few, but that 
the priest-hunting profession was over-crowded, 
prices slumped. After the Cromwellian Settle- 
ment, for instance, although priests were then 
scarce, prices touched rock-bottom — because 
every man of the settlers was trying, through 
priest-hunting, to make a little ready money on 
the side. Here are a few sample disbursement 
items from the Government records of 1657: 

"Five pounds to Thomas Gregson, Evan Pow- 
ell, and Samuel Alley, to be equally divided up- 
on them, for arresting a Popish priest, Donogh 
Hagerty, taken and now secured in the County 

78 



^ THE PENAL LAWS 

jail at Clonmel." For, neighboring British set- 
tlers often formed a co-partnership in the good 
work, and divided their earnings, share and share 
ah'ke 

An enterprising man, however, such as an ex- 
soldier sometimes employed hired help for priest- 
hunting, and, paying them by the day's w^ork, 
thus reaped larger profits for himself. For in- 
stance "To Lieutenant Edwin Wood, twenty- 
five pounds for five priests and three frairs ap- 
prehended by him — namely Thomas McGeogha- 
gan, furlough MacGovvan, Hugh Goan, Terence 
Fitzsimmons, and another — who on examination 
confessed themselves to be priests and friars." 
It must not be misunderstood that the generous 
Lieutenant threw in three friars for good measure, 
gratis to the Government. There was only a 
total of five head in the round-up, all of them 
priests, but three of them belonging to the orders. 

"To Humphrey Gibbs and to Corporal Thomas 
Hill ten pounds for apprehending two Popish 
priests, namely Maurice Prendergast and Ed- 
ward Fahy." The ex-soldiers with their greater 
keeness and very fine training were usually able 
to skin the field — to the disgust of the civilians. 

"To Arthur Spollen, Robert Pierce, and John 
Brue;i, five pounds for their good service per- 



IRELAND'S CASE 

funned in apprehending and bringing before the 
Right Hon. Lord Chief Justice Pepys on the 
2 1 St January last, one Popish priest, Edwin 
Duhy." Only five pounds between three saints I 
The civilians it will be observed were only pikers 
at the work. 

Maybe it was as well. For then, as now, too 
great commercial success, led these Captains of 
industry to ultimate ruin. Exempli gratia, Mr. 
Terrell. The Dublin Intelligencer of May 23, 
1713 records the sad news — ^'^This day Terrell 
the famous priest-catcher, who was condemned 
this term of Assize for having several wives, was 
executed.*' The poor fellow could no more with- 
stand success than a Pittsburgh millionaire. 

Under Elizabeth it was enacted that every 
Romish priest found in Ireland after a certain 
date should be deemed guilty of rebellion, that 
he should "be hanged till dead then his head 
taken off, his bowels taken out and burned, and 
his head fixed on a pole in some public place.*' 

And the same act of Elizabeth provided that 
any one who harboured a priest should have all 
his goods confiscated and should die upon the 
gallows. 

The Puritans whose renowned struggle for 
liberty of consLcience (their conscience), still 

80 



THE PENAL LAWS 

makes the world ring— ^the Puritans, in their con- 
suming zeal for liberty of conscience, re-enacted 
in Ireland this law of Elizabeth — ^with improve- 
ments. They provided that not only any man 
who harboured a priest, but any man who knew 
where a priest was hidden, and did not hurry the 
information to the authorities, should be punished 
with death. And furthermore they enacted thai 
even the private exercise of the Roman Catholic 
Religion in Ireland should be punished by death. 

Schoolmaster hunting, and priest hunting, in 
those days became a very profitable pursuit, and 
many enterprising Englishmen emigrated to Ire- 
land to enter the remunerative profession. Even 
Portuguese Jews came over to push their fortune 
at the sport. 

The Protestant Dr. Taylor says "During the 
latter part of the seventeenth and the beginning 
of the eighteenth century priest hunting had be- 
come a favorite field sport." 

Unlike most other field sports however, the 
end of the field day did not end the enjoyment. 
After the criminal was taken — if he was taken 
alive — the fun entered a new phase. For the 
prolongation of the enjoyment of the English 
sportsmen a "trial" was often staged and regular 
sentence gravely pronounced and its execution 

8i 



IRELAND'S CASE 

carried out with as much orderliness as an Ala- 
bama lynching-bee, 

A fair sample of the proceedings of the time 
is afforded by the case of Oliver Plunkett the 
meek and saintly Archbishop of Armagh, whose 
execution furnished an English holiday in 1680. 
The Protestant Bishop Burnett says of his case, 
**The witnesses were brutal and profligate 
imen." He was charged with the crime of trying 
Ito establish the Catholic religion in Ireland. The 
iLord Chief Justice pronounced sentence "And 
jtherefore you must go hence to the place from 
whence you came, that is, to Newgate, and from 
thence you shall be drawn through the city of 
London to Tyburn; there you shall be hanged 
b}' the neck, but cut down before you are dead, 
your bowels shall be taken out and burnt before 
your face, your head shall be cut off, and your 
body divided into four quarters, to be disposed 
of as His Majesty pleases. And I pray God 
to have mercy on your soul." 

Anotker historian describing the end of this 
base criminal says, **His speech ended and the 
cap drawn over his eyes, Oliver Plunkett again 
recommended his happy soul, with raptures of 
devotion into the hands of Jesus, his Saviour, for 
whose sake he died — ^till the cart was drawn from 

82 



THE PENAL LAWS 

under him. Thus then he hung betwixt Heaven 
and earth, an open sacrifice to God for innocence 
and religion ; and as soon as he expired the exe- 
cutioner ripped his body open and pulled out his 
iieart and bowels, and threw them in the fire, 
already kindled near the gallows for that pur- 
pose." And so perished one "surpliced ruffian" 
ot Ireland — to the glory of England and God. 

The Scottish Protestant, Dr. Smiles, (the fa- 
mous "Self-Help" Man,) in his History of Ire- 
land, says "The Catholic Irishman was degraded 
into a mere serf and bondsman of the soil — from 
all proprietorship in ^which he was debarred. 
His property (if he had any), might now be 
seiaed by his Protestant neighbors; the child 
might plunder the father; the wife, the husband; 
the servant, the master. The nation lay at the 
mercy of the vilest kind of discoverers and in- 
formers. The history of that time is the most 
eloquent in the history of Ireland — eloquent of 
suffering and endurance under the deadliest 
wrongs. . ^ ,. ^ 

:KWe will pause in our picturing of the English 
crime in Ireland- — ^to consider a thought that may 
naturally arise in many minds. 

"Might not the Irish themselves, if they had 

83 



IRELAND'S CASE 

had the power, have persecuted their enemies 
aker the same fashioa?'* 

I confess it would be natural to expect that the 
Irish, coming into power, should have oppressed, 
persecuted and massacred those who had plun- 
ered them of their patrimony, made their land 
flow with blood, and forced them, the natives of 
this land, into the direst bondage. 

It would be only natuml to expect this. But 
let us study an actual instance of what did occur. 
And after that we'll glance at an instance of the 
opposite kind. 

When James II. came to Ireland in 1689 and 
rallied around him the often-befooled Irish peo- 
ple — and that the Irish were, for once, in complete 
control again of their own country, an Irish Par- 
liament met in Dublin on May 7, 1689. 

This was a Catholic Irish Parliament, repre- 
senting a Catholic Irish country. The members 
of it were men called together in the frenzy^of 
Civil War — ^men too, everyone of whom w^s 
smarting from memory of the vilest wrongs ever 
wrought by conqueror on conquered. Lecky 
saijFS oft the members of the House of Commons : 
"Thftv were almost all new men animated by 
resentment! of bitteie«ti wrongs," — men* most! of 
whomi liadi beeti fobbed of their father's estates. 

84 



THE PENAL LAWS 

Yet though these men burned with holy indigna- 
tion for the persecutions that they and their land 
and their people had suffered at the hands of the 
plunderer and the murderer — and though in this 
their hour of triumph they held the power of life 
and death over their wrongers, Lecky confesses, 
with evident astonishment, "They established 
freedom of religion in a moment of excitement 
and passion.'* 

By this Parliament it was enacted "We hereby 
declare that it is the law of this land that not 
now, or ever again, shall any man be persecuted 
for his religion." 

Four Protestant Bishops sat in the Upper 
House. No Catholic Bishop was called to sit 
there. Fifteen outlawed Catholic peers were re- 
called, but only five new peers were made. Six 
Protestant members sat in the Lower House — 
most of the rest of the Protestant members hav- 
ing espoused the cause of William, or fled to 
England. 

They established free schools. 

Where Catholic Ireland had before been com- 
pelled to support the Protestant Church, this 
Parliament enacted that Catholics should pay 
dues to Catholic pastors, and Protestants should 
pay dues to Protestant pastors. 

8s 



IRECAND'S CASE 

The Catholic Bishop Moloney in writing to the 
Parliament went so far as to recommend that 
compensation should be provided for all Pro- 
testant Church beneficiaries who, under the for- 
eigner's regime, had been paid by the state. 

And thus did these Irish Catholics, in their 
brief moment of triumph, to the usurpers who 
had persecuted and plundered them till as one 
Protestant historian confesses, ^'Protestantism 
came to be associated in the native mind with 
spoliation, confiscation, and massacre." 

Lecky admits that under this Irish Catholic 
Parliament "The Protestant clergy were guar- 
anteed full liberty of professing, preaching, and 
teaching their religion.** 

And now let us glance at a contrasting picture. 

A little more than two years after the sitting 
and legislating of the Irish Catholic Parliament, 
the British once more got the upper hand — by 
agreement. In the Williamite War that ensued, 
the Williamites won all before them — till they 
came to Limerick. After two long sieges they 
could not defeat the Irish there. Accordingly 
they ended the war by the celebrated Treaty of 
Limerick. Under this treaty, to which the faith 
and honor of the English crown were pledged, 
the Irish people were promised in their own coun- 

86 



THE PENAL LAWS 

try equal protection with the British usurper 
there, for their properties and their liberties — • 
and in particular they were to enjoy the free and 
unfettered exercise of their religion. 

On these conditions, and in their innocence 
thinking that the pledged faith and honor of the 
English crown was an inviolable guarantee, the 
Irish laid down their arms and ended the war. 

What followed? 

As it has been often, and well put, the cele- 
brated Treaty of Limerick was broken before 
the ink on the document was dry. 

When the Lords Justices, returning from the 
treaty signing, attended service in Christ Church 
Cathedral, Dr. Dopping, Lord Bishop of Meath 
opened the ball by preaching a furious sermon 
upon the sin of keeping faith with pa,pists. All 
over the country the persecution and plundering 
of the papist began again, and was soon in full 
swing. A million acres of papists' lands were con- 
fiscated. The British settlers in Ireland began 
bombarding Parliament with petitions against the 
Irish papists. If these people got their liberties 
it was shown that Ireland Avould be no place for 
decent British people. For instance, the Ma3^or 
and the Aldermen of Lim-erick, in their petition 
to Parliament, protested that they were ''greatly 

87 



IRELAND'S CASE 

damaged in their trade ( with the honest British 
residents) by the large number of papists residing 
here." Just as every good American knows kow 
any American quarter is cheapened and ruined 
by negroes migrating into it, so Irish towns were 
ruined by the mere Irish being allowed to crawl 
in. 

Even the Protestant coal porters of Dublin pre- 
sented in Parliament "the petition of one Edward 
Spragg and others" in which the petitioners hum- 
bly show that Darby Ryan, a papist, is employ- 
ing porters of his own religion ! 

Just imagine — if you can — the impudence of the 
diaboKcal Darby, an Irish papist living in a pap- 
ist Ireland under the solemn pledge of the English 
crown's faith and honor that he should enjoy 
equal liberties with the foreigner — imagine this 
scoundrel petpetrating the outrage of giving his 
fellow papists* "work to do ! The astounding impu- 
dence of the impudent fellow surpassed the com- 
prehension of eve«y» noble-minded Briton ! 

Only thre« years after the faith* and honor of the 
British cpown had been pledged to the papists, 
the Parfiamaat passed) its Act for the Better Se- 
curingr of the Government against Papists, 

No Ostholie cottkl henc^iih havs0i'*g«n,pi*tol 
or sword'y or any other weapon of offense of de- 

68 



THE PENAL LAWS 

fcnse, tinder penalty of fine, imprisonment, pillory 
or public whipping." It was provided that any 
magistrate could visit the house of any of the 
Irish, at any hour of the night or day, and ransack 
it for concealed weapons. John Mitchel says 
"It fared ill with any Catholic who fell under the 
displeasure of his formidable neighbors." He says 
no papist was safe from suspicion who had money 
to pay fines — but woe to the papist who had a 
handsome daughter! 

Under the pledged faith and honor of the Brit- 
ish crown, which promised to secure the Irish 
from any disturbance on account of their religion, 
it was now enacted that "All Popish Archbishops, 
Bishops, Vicars-General, Deans, Jesuits, monks, 
friars, and all other regular Popish clergy shall 
depart out of this kingdom before the first day of 
May, 1698" — under penalty of transportation for 
life if they failed to comply — and under penalty 
to those who should dare to return, of being 
hanged, drawn and quartered. 

And by such liberality and generosity on the 
part of the British was the Irish nation repaid for 
the generosity it had shown them in its hour of 
triumph. 

And to our foolish trusting Irish people thus 
was exemplified for the ninety and ninth time, the 

89 



IRELANiD^S CASE 

folly of relying on a "solemn treaty'* of Britain-— 
of thinking there was some value in the "pledged 
faith and honor" of the British Crown! 

This is the same Britain that was so painfully 
shocked (bless its virtuous heart!) when, recent- 
ly, a German diplomat called a treaty a scrap 
of paper! Those unutterable Germans 1 



CHAPTER VI. 
STILL THE PENAL LAWS 

Throughout those dark days the hunted Irish 
schoolmaster, with price upon his head, was hid- 
den from house to house. And in the summer 
days he gathered his little class, hungering and 
thirsting for knowledge, behind a hedge in re- 
mote mountain glen — where, while tattered lads 
upon the hilltops kept watch for the British sol- 
diers, he fed to his eager pupils the forbidden 
fruit of the tree of knowledge. 

Latin and Greek were taught to ragged hunt- 
ed ones under shelter of the hedges —whence 
these teachers were known as hedge schoolmas- 
ters. A knowledge of Latin was a frequent 
enough accomplishment among poor Irish moun- 
taineers in the seventeenth century, — and was 
spoken by many of them on special occasions. It 
is truthfully boar^ted that cows were sometimes 
bought and sold in Greek, in mountain market- 
places of Kerry. T had a valued friend, an old 
mountaineer in Donegal, who told me how, 
even at the end of the eighteenth century, his 

91 



IRELAND'S CASE 

father, then a youth, used to hear at "The 
Priests Dinner," in the mountain station house, 
the priest, the schoolmaster and many of the 
well-to-do mountaineers discourse in Latin. 

To these hedge schoolmasters who at the cost 
of all their happiness and risk of their lives, fed 
tlie little flame of knowledge and k^pt it burn- 
ing among the hills and glens of Ireland, through- 
out Ireland's dread night, Ireland can never re- 
pay her debt. In my book of verse, "Ballads of 
a Country-boy," I sing a little stave to their 
memory : 

THE HEDGE SCHOOLMASTERS 

When the night shall lift from Erin's hills, 'twere 

shame if we forget 
One band of unsung heroes whom Freedom owes 

a debt. 
When we brim high cups to t^ave ones then, 

their memory let us pledge 
Who gathered their ragged classes behind a 

friendly hedge. 

By stealth they met their pupils in the glen's 

deep-hidden nook, 
And taught them mat^ a lesson was never in 

English book; 

93 



STILL THE PENAL LAWS 

There was more than wordy logic shown to use 
in wise debate; 

Nor amo was the only verb they gave to con- 
jugate. 

When hunted on the heathery hill and through 
the shadowy wood, 

They cHmbed the cliff, they dared the marsh, they 
stemmed the tumbling flood; 

Their blanket was the clammy mist, their bed 
the wind-swept bent; 

in fitful sleep they dreamt the bay of blood- 
hounds on their scent. 

Their lore was not the brightest, nor their store, 

mayhap, the best. 
But they fostered love, undying, in each young 

Irish breast; 
And through the dread, dread night, and long, 

that steeped our island then. 
The lamps of hope and fires of faith were fed by 

these brave men. 
The grass waves green above them ; soft sleep is 

theirs for aye; 
The hunt is over, and the cold ; the hunger passed 

away. 

93 



IRELAND'S CASE 

O, hold them high and holy I and their memory 

proudly pledge, 
Who gathered their ragged classes behind a 

friendly hedge. 

Throughout these dreadful centuries, 'too," tte 
hunted priest — who as a youth had been smuggled 
to the Continent of Europe to receive his training 
— tended the flame of faith. He was hidden like 
a thief among the hills. On Sundays and feast 
days he celebrated Mass on a rock on a mountain- 
sMe in a remote glen, while the congregation 
knelt there on the heather of the hillside under 
the open heavens. While he said Mass, faithful 
sentries watched from all the nearby hilltops, to 
give timely warning of the approaching priest- 
hunter and his guard of British soldiers. ' ^ j^S 

But sometimes the troops came on them un- 
awares, and the Mass Rock was bespattered with 
the blood of the "surpliced ruffian* (jas he is, 
by English authority, appropriately named), — 
and men, women and children caught red-handed 
in the crime of worshipping God among the glens, 
were butchered on the mountainside. - 

Bishops and archbishops, meanly dressed in 
rough home-spuns, trudged on foot among their 

94 



STILL THE PENAL LAWS 

people— and sometimes sheltered themselves, and 
ate and slept in caves in the ground. 

The gentle Spenser in his day, observing all 
this, "did marvel" how these hunted priests, fore- 
going all the comforts and pleasures of life, and 
inviting both life and death's fearfulest terrors, 
pursued their mission "without hope of reward 
and richesse.'* 

"Reward and richesse!" exclaims the Presby- 
terian patriot, John Mitchell, commenting on this, 
**L.know the spots within my own part of Ireland 
where veners^le archbishops hid themselves, as it 
w ere, in a hole of the rock. . . . Yet it was 
with full knowledge of all this, with full resolu- 
tion to brave all this, that many hundreds of edu- 
cated Irishmen, fresh from the colleges of Bel- 
gium or of Spain, pushed to the Sea Coast at 
Brest or St. Malo, to find some way of crossing 
to the land that offered them a life of work and of 
woe. Imagine a priest ordained at Seville or 
Sal^amanca, a gentleman of high old name, a 
man of eloquence and genius, who has sustained 
disputations in the college halls on question of 
literature or theology, and carried off prizes and 
crowns ;— see him on the quays of Brest, bargain- 
ing with some skipper to be allowed to work his 
passage. He wears tarry breeches and a tar- 

95 



IRELAND^S CASE 

paulin hat (for disguise was gemerally needed) — 
he throws himself on board, doe« his !ull part of 
the hardest work, neither feelimg the cold spray 
nor the fiercest tempest. And he knows, too, that 
the end of it all, for him, may be a row of sugar 
canes to hoe, under the blazing sun of Barbadoes, 
overlooked by a broad-hatted agent of a Bristol 
plantation. Yet he pushes eagerly to meet his 
fate ; for he carries in his hands a sacred deposit, 
bears in his heart a holy message, and must tell it 
or die. See him, at last, springing ashore, and 
hurryiMg on to seek his bishop in some cave, or 
under some hedge — but going with caution by 
reason of the priest catcher and the wolf dogs." 

The learned and saintly Bishop Gallagher (still 
famed for his sermons), a noble and beautiful 
chafacter, had many narrow escapes from butch- 
ery in his unending peregrinations, traveling 
stick in hand, and homespun clad, among his 
flock — sleeping, sometimes in human habitation, 
sometimes in a hole in the bank and frequently 
among the beasts of the field. Once when he had 
the good fortune to be sheltered under a poor roof 
in Donegal, he was aroused in the middle of the 
night by the alarm that the priest hunters were 
c^ose upon him. Half-clad, he escaped— but the 
poor man who had been guilty of housing him, 

96 



STILL THE PENAL LAWS 

was taken out and butchered — thereby saving the 
priest hunters from an entirely unprofitable and 
uncomfortable night journey. 

After Bishop Gallagher was translated from 
Donegal to a Bishopric in the midlands, the 
Bishop's Palace of this learned and truly noble 
man was a bothy built against a bank in the bog 
of Allen. 

Thus in their miserable lairs, in the bogs and 
barren mountains, whither they were trailed by 
wolf-hounds and blood-hounds, were sheltered all 
that was noble, high and holy in Ireland — while 
scoundrels, silk-and-fine-linen-clad, fattening on 
the <at of an anguished land, languished in the 
country's high seats of honor; or with Bible in 
blood-embrued hands, and eyes upturned to God, 
stalked abroad, models of true English Christian- 
ity for the edification of the Irish barbarians. 

The late date down to which these persecutions 
were carried may be judged from the fact that the 
present Irish Primate's predecessor. Archbishop 
McGettigan, used to tell how, in his young days, 
at the Mass Rock in the mountain, he acted as 
sentry, as acolite, and as candle-stick (one of the 
two boys who at either side of the altar-rock held 
the lighted candle and shielded it from the wind). 

On the occasion of a recent lecture tour in Cal- 

97 



IRELAND'S CASE 

ifornia, I met, in a valley of the Sierras, a middle- 
aged Donegal man, who told me how when he 
was a little boy in Donegal a man with a much 
disfigured face came one day to his father's house, 
and how his father told him that the man had es- 
caped with only this disfigurement from a Mass 
Rock massacre — when the priest hunters and sol- 
diers had, unawares, surprised the congregation 
in their crime. 

In contrast with the manner in which the Irish 
papist was dealt with for his religion sake, keep 
in mind how he dealt with others when he had 
had the upper hand. 

We have already seen what happened in the 
tunes of Mary of England, and of James II. of 
England. 

The old-time Protestant, William Parnell, in 
his historical treatise, testified: "The Roman 
Catholics are the only sect that ever resumed 
power without exercising vengeance." 

With this Protestant testimony to the liber- 
ality and forgiveness of the Irish to their oppres- 
sors, contrast then another Protestant's testimony 

98 



STILL THE PENAL LAWS 

to the Hb^ality of the usurpers to their victims. 
Under the rule of the English, Smiles tells us, 
"Laws of the most ferocious cruelty were devised 
against the Catholic priesthood. They were 
hunted like wild beasts, hanged, tortured, behead- 
ed and quartered. The mere Irish were deprived 
of the protection of the English law, and might 
be killed with impunity." 

Indeed the bereaved family needed to be grate- 
ful, if the good Englishman who took the trouble 
to shoot one of its members generously refrained 
from assessing them with the price of the gun's 
priming. 

It is good to record that many and many a time 
during the centuries of Ireland's agony, the de- 
cent Protestant hid the hunted priest when the 
bloodhounds, and human hounds, were close upon 
him, and saved his life — at the risk, too, of his 
own. 

And many a time, too, the decent Protestant — 
sometimes a poor man — accepted legal transfer of 
the lands of his Catholic neighbor to hold these 
lands for his Catholic neighbor's benefit, and thus 
save them from being forfeited to an informer. 

Of the Penal system, the great Irish Protestant, 
Edmund Burke, said : "It was a machine of wise 

99 



IRELAND'S CASE 

and elaborate contrivance as well fiitted for the 
impoverishment and degradation of a people, and 
the debasement in them of human nature, as ever 
proceeded from the perverted ingenuity of man." 
And of those dreadful days the ardent Protes- 
tant young Irelander, Thomas Davis, sang : 

**0 weep those days — the Penal Days 

When Ireland hopelessly complained 1 
O weep those days, the Penal Days, 

When Godless persecution reigned! 
They bribed the flock, they bribed the son, 

To sell the priest, and rob the sire. 
Their dogs were taught alike to run 

Upon the track of wolf and friar; 
Among the poor and on the moor, 

Were hid the faithful and the true. 
While traitor, slave, and recreant knave. 

Had riches rank and retenue." 

Even in recent days in some of the remote parts 
of Ireland often the local representatives of Brit- 
ish power, the landlord and magistrate, would not 
permit the erection of a Catholic Church within 
the district that he lorded over. The Church of 
the famous, fighting Father McFadden in Gwee- 
dore, had to be erected on a No-man's land, the 

100 



STILL THE PENAL LAWS 

dead-line between the possessions of two English 
landlords — a gulch which had been the bed of 
a mountain torrent — now diverted. On a fatal 
stormy Sunday in the '8o's the torrent, finding its 
old way again, swept down upon the little chapel 
when it was packed with its mountain congrega- 
tion, carried away chapel, priest and worshippers, 
and left sad hearts and lone hearths in bleak 
Gweedore. 

In my own parish of Inver, a relic of the Penal 
Days was with us till I had reached mature man- 
hood — in the form of a scalan — a three-walled, 
thatched Mass-shed which sheltered the altar and 
the officiating priest. In front of the open end, 
the congregation, gathered hither from miles of 
moor and mountain, kneeling on the bare hillside 
under the open Heavens — often with slush soak- 
ing their knees, and pelting rain or driving hail 
mercilessly lashing their bodies, and whipping 
their upturned faces — heard Mass every Sunday. 
Whether blowing or snowing, shining or shower- 
ing, every Sunday morning were there from re- 
mote homes man and woman, boy and girl, bare- 
footed child and crawling old. I have knelt with 
them — one of them. 

In the days when I, a bouchaillin, scudd ed 
the moors to Mass, there mothered England and 

lOI 



IRELAND'S CASE 

step-mothered Ireland a very respectable, very 
lugubrious, and very homely-minded old lady, 
who had developed a comfortable embonpoint, 
and fattened a very large and very ordinary 
brood of children, at the expense of poor, lean, 
famished, famine-haunted Ireland — a worthy 
enough old lady who represented the power that 
robbed us of everything except our hardships, 
and gave us nothing but our poverty. Now about 
the very time that our scalan congregation would 
be kneeling down on the arctic shoulder of Ardag- 
I'ey Hill this good lady and her middling well- 
trained children would probably be bogging their 
knees in the yielding plush of their prie-dieux 
in the magnificent Chapel of Buckingham Palace 
— or before a comforting fire, languidly sinking 
out of one another's sight in the caressing up- 
holstery of their Palace drav/ing-room. And I 
can vividly remember the queer questioning that 
started in my boyish mind one fierce February 
Sunday when, with the miserable multitude at 
Mass on that storm-lashed hillside, our knees 
sunk in the marrow-freezing mire, our few sorry 
clothes soaked through and plastered to our bones 
by the snow-broth, our bared heads battered, and 
faces whipped and cut by the driving sleet, I 
heard the sagart (a simple saintly soul) lead us 

I02 



STILL THE PENAL LAWS 

in supplication to the Lord to grant health and 
happiness to, and shower His manifold blessings 
upon, "Her Majesty, the Queen of this Realm, 
and all the Royal Family!" 

Oh the irony of the ways of poor hungry Ire- 
land ! Oh the wistful naivete of comfortable, fat 
England ! happy as the happiest hog that ever 
wallowed and grunted in the split wealth of his 
sty! 



IP3 



CHAPTER VII. 
THE BRITISH GARRISON IN IRELAND 

This chapter does not treat upon the ordinary- 
British army in Ireland. It refers to an unofficial 
British army, w'hich, more than the regular army, 
has held Ireland for England — held it down. 

What has come to be known as the British gar- 
rison in Ireland, is the vast body of the Brito- 
Irish, referred to in the last chapter as having 
been amcngst the cruellest, most brutal maltreat- 
ors of the Irish people. It is the greater portion 
of the descendants of the British — the English 
and Scotch, who, through centuries, came here 
either as officials to grow fat upon Ireland or as 
settlers to accept her richest confiscated lands. 

While a small, but important, percentage of the 
best of them have become truly Irish, the greater 
part of these people, whose families have been 300 
and 400 years in Ireland, are, today, more truly 
anti-Irish than were their forefathers, centuries 
ago. 

The early English who came over before the 
days of Elizabeth, and who were chiefly Norman 

104 



THE BRITISH GARRISON IN IRELAl^D 

English, were absorbed by the Irish, almost as 
fast as they settled amongst them. It was the 
bitter complaint of an early English Deputy to 
the British Parliament that these people to whom 
England had generously given, with lavish hand, 
of Irish lands, had after a few generations become 

— ^to quote his oft-quoted words— "ipsis Hiber- 
nicis Hiberniores" — ^more Irish than the Irish 
themselves. Special laws had to be passed by the 
British Parliament, forbidding amongst these 
early British settlers in Ireland any Irish cus- 
toms, Irish maimers, Irish dress, Irish language — 
in endeavor to save them to England as an Eng- 
lish garrison. But the laws were passed in vain. 
The exceptional cruelty that characterized the 
British wars in Ireland from Elizabeth onwards, 
coupled with the difference .of religion of all set- 
tlers thenceforward, and the religious persecution 
which was superadded to the political, now ac- 
complished what laws had hitherto failed to do. 
The two races henceforward not only never 
blended, but the bitterest feelings between them 
were naturally begotten and nurtured. And the 
major part of British in Ireland from that day to 
the present day, have reversed the order of their 
antecedents and become more anti-Irish than the 



IRELAND'S CASE 

English, more British than the British them- 
selves. 

What we call the British garrison in Ireland — 
all of those of purely British blood who still retain 
their British anti-Irish bias — constitutes about 
one-fourth of the population of the Island at the 
present day — by far the largest portion of them 
being in the northeast of the Island, with Belfast, 
so to speak, as their capital center. It is they 
who, today, form the political party known as 
Unionists, Orangemen, Anti-Home Rulers, and 
anti-everything that is for the political advance- 
ment of the country on which they batten. 

By far the largest portion of this British gar- 
risn in Ireland was planted here in the beginning 
and in the middle of the seventeenth century. 
They came over chiefly in the course of two great 
"settlements" — the Ulster Plantation and the 
Cromwellian Settlement. 

,The Ulster Plantation was carried out in the 
first decade of the seventeenth century by James 
the First of England (Sixth of Scotland). From 
five of the richest counties of Ulster (which has 
nine counties in all), he drove such of the Irish as 
had survived the sword — drove them to dwell 
with the snipes on the moors, and the badgers in 
the mountainSj of those barren portions of Ulster 

^^ ■- . To6 



THE BRITISH GARRISON IN IRELAND 

that were of no use to him, his followers or any 
normal human being. The fertile lands that were 
taken from these fugitives — about the most fertile 
in Ireland — James bestowed upon his own faith- 
ful Scots. He brought over the Scotch Under- 
takers (as they were officially called), and par- 
celled out to them the confiscated rich lands in 
parcels of 5,000 acres, 2,000 acres, and 1,000 acres. 

Yet the sons of Ulster Scots (and many of 
their unthinking advocates) now proudly point 
to their wealth and their Catholic neighbors' pov- 
erty — as object lessons on industry and idleness ! 

The written conditions on which they^ were 
given these lands — and on which they undertook 
them — are practically all summed up in the stipu- 
lation that they were to be England's garrison 
in Ulster — keeping so many armed retainers and 
so many stands of arms, and building their houses 
like fortresses, to hold the wild Irish confined to 
their mountain lairs, if they could not succeed in 
extinguishing them. 

The aim, object and conditions of the Ulster 
Plantation (as it is known) is very pithily pre- 
sented in a few words of a communication from 
one of the garrison in Ireland to a government 
official in England. I do not recall whether it 
is from Lecky or from Mrs. Green, that are 

107 



IRELAND'S CASE 

taken these words of the British gentleman. 
*'The present frame of Irish government is partic- 
ularly well suited for our purpose. That frame 
is a Protestant garrison in possession of the land, 
magistracy, and power of the country; holding 
that property under the tenure of British power 
and supremacy, and ready at every instant to 
crush the rising of the conquered." And thus 
were the Irishrie induced to develop their well- 
known affection for Mother England. 

Sir John Davies in his book, "Discoverie of 
the True Causes Why Ireland Was Never Sub- 
dued and Brought Under Obedience to the 
Crowne of England Until the Beginning of His 
Majestie's Happie Reign," throws interesting 
light on this. He says, "The multitude, having 
been brayed, as it were, in a mortar, with sword, 
pestilence and famine, altogether became admir- 
ers of the crowne of England." How could the 
gratified creatures help it, gentle Sir John! 

These people and their descendants, in Ulster, 
far from blending with the Irish people, always 
aimed, as was expected, to trample them out. 
From the day they came to Ireland to the pres- 
ent day there has been no intermarriage, no in- 
termixture. The two streams have since flowed 
side by side but always in contrast, always dis- 

io8 



THE BRITISH GARRISON IN IRELAND 

tinct. And the flow has never, to the present 
day, been peaceable. 

These Scotch-Irish (as they have been nick- 
named in America) always, up to a few years 
ago, held all honors, ail offices, all power, in their 
hands — even, so far as they dared, the power of 
life and death over their Irish papist neighbors. 
But from their first day in Ireland down to their 
last day of power (which, in some parts of Ul- 
ster, is not yet) they exercised the power piti- 
lessly upon their despoiled neighbors — ^always, 
of course, for patriotic reasons. 

And that the "patriots' " last day of power is 
not just yet is eloquently evidenced by cold gov- 
ernment statistics. The return of men holding 
Eocal Government Offices in Ulster five years 
ago shows that there were 1,192 Protestant office- 
holders and 199 Catholics! What the statistics 
do not show, however, is that almost all of the 
199 favored Papists got offices which were too 
mean for the God's chosen to accept. 

The story of the terrible wrongs inflicted by 
these settlers and their descendants upon those 
whom they or their forefathers had dispossessed 
would make as fearful reading as does any chap- 
ter of Irish history since the coming of the Eng- 
lish. 

109 



IRELAND'S CASE 

But as their power of wrong doing has almost 
passed, it is better that the repulsive particulars 
of the wrong doing should pass with it. The de- 
plorable situation of the harried and hunted 
Irish of the North during that time may be 
summed up and dismissed in the words of an 
Anglo-Irish Jurist of the bad days — "The law 
does not suppose any such person to exist as an 
Irish Roman Catholic." 

Befere quitting this portion of the subject, it 
will be of interest to Irish-Americans and to 
Scotch-Irish-Americans ta note the character of 
the tfiQTL who formed the Ulster Colony, from 
which came those whom America names the 
Scotch-Irish. I quote the testimonials not from 
their enemies but from their own. And it can- 
not be disputed that they knew of what they were 
speaking. 

Reid, in his "History of the Irish Presbyteri- 
ans," says, "Although among those whom divine 
Providence did send to Ireland, there were sev- 
eral persons eminent for both education and 
parts, yet the most part were such as either pov- 
erty or scandalous lives had forced hither." 

And Stewart, the son of a Presbyterian min- 
ister who was one of the planters, writes, "From 
Scotland came many, and from England not a 

no 



THE BRITISH GARRISON IN IRELAND 

few, yet all of them generally the scum of both 
nations, who from debt, or breaking, or fleeing 
justice, or serjnng shelter, came hither hoping 
to be without fear of man's justice." 

It is well worth observing that while, for 
the first hundred years after they came to Ireland 
these Ulster Presbyterians worked con amore 
with the English Episcopalians, in passing and 
in executing the cruellest laws for the suppression 
of the hunted Irish, — in the reign of Anne, when 
the Episcopalians found themselves able to do 
vvithout the aid of these despised tools, the 
Ulster Presbyterians were, for half a cen- 
tury, treated to a right hearty dose of 
the very medicine they had so eagerly mixed 
for the hated Papists, llie laws they had helped 
to pass for the suppression of Papistry, were now 
used for the suppression of Presbyterianism — 
their religion was proscribed, their industries were 
killed — the rod they had pickled for the Papist 
VI as right smartly applied to their own hereafters 
— they were whipped out of Ulster, and in tens 
of thousands sent scurrying to America, where 
they arrived in crovv^ded ship-loads, calling down 
curses on England, her persecutions and perse- 
cutors ! 

It was amongst these people in Ulster that the 

III 



IRELAND'S CASE 

Orange Society was formed, and fostered, prac- 
tically for the suppression of Roman Catholics 
and Roman Catholicism. And it is these people 
who, still foreigners in blood, breeding, educa- 
tion, and outlook, occupying less than one-half 
of Ulster, and electing less than half of the Parli- 
amentary representatives of Ulster, are mistak- 
enly known in America as Ulsterites, and are 
mistakenly supposed to own and occupy all, or 
almost all, of Ulster. Though it must be admit- 
ted that the amount of noise they make when 
taking Ulster's name in vain makes it excusable 
for any uninformed outsider to suppose that they 
own not only all Ulster but all Ireland. 

This Ulster plantation was then one of the 
very great and permanent "Settlements" of Ire- 
land. The other great and permanent one oc- 
curred half a century later. It was the Crom- 
wellian Settlement. 

Cromwell began by desolating Ireland and 
then settling it. But first let me say, in Crom- 
well's behalf, that in depopulating and desolat- 
ing the land he was merely carrying out orders 
conscientiously. From Dublin, under date 25th 
February, 1642, the Government issued for the 
guidance of its generals, the very clear and ex- 
plicit command, "to wound, kill, slay and destroy 

112 



THE BRITISH GARRISON IN IRELAND 

by all the ways and means you may, all the reb- 
els and adherents and relievers; and burn, spoil, 
waste, consume and demolish all places, towns, 
and houses, where the said rebels are or have 
been relieved and harboured, and all hay and 
corn there, and kill and destroy all the men in- 
habiting, able to bear arms." (See Carte's "Or- 
mond"). 

When Cromwell had completed his work to his 
satisfaction, and that almost all of the able-bodied 
men (not to mention thousands of old men, 
women and children) had been killed and de- 
stroyed or sold into slavery, the Cromwellian 
Settlement began under direction of the English 
Comxmissioners. The survivors of the Irish peo- 
ple were, by Parliamentary edict, commanded to 
betake themselves to Connaught — the wild and 
desolate Province beyond the Shannon — by or 
before the first day of May, 1654. And the 
Cromwellian troops were paid with confiscated 
lands and homes. 

Of this time Prendergast gives a picture in 
his "Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland"; "Ire- 
land, in the language of Scripture, now lay void 
as a wilderness. Five-sixths of her people had 
perished. Women and children were found 
daily perishing in ditches, starved. The bodies 

113 



IRELAND'S CASE 

of many wandering orphans, whose fathers had 
been killed or exiled, and whose mothers had 
died of famine, were preyed upon by wolves. In 
the years 1562 and 1563 the plague, following the 
desolating wars, had swept away whole counties, 
so that one might travel twenty or thirty miles 
and not see a living creature. Man, beast and 
bird were all dead, or had quit those desolate 
places. The troops would tell stories of the 
place where they saw a smoke, it was so rare to 
see either smoke by day, or fire or 'candle by 
night. If two or three cabins were met with, 
there were found none but aged men, with women 
and children; and they, in the words of the 
prophet, 'become as a bottle in the smoke/ their 
skins black like an oven because of the terrible 
famine." 

Then every knave and rascal from England, 
and every English vulture, harpy and ghoul, flew 
hither, to rob the dead and the dying. Over the 
desolate land from which was rising the reek 
of blood that smelt good in the nostrils of these 
scoundrels, they roamed, picking and choosing 
where they would, and where they could — and 
in the meantime lived zestfully and profitably by 
harrying and murdering and plundering of their 
few pitiable belongings, the streams of tottering 

114 



f HE BRITISH GARRISON IN IRELAND 

\ ery old and crawling very young, the hungering, 
piteous children and skeleton-like, hollow-eyed 
old men and women who, with sighs and groans 
and breaking hearts, were painfully toiling on 
their weakened limbs to their Westward Siberia. 
"To Hell or Connaught" had been the command. 
These poor creatures had chosen Connaught. 

From the Government records, Prendergast 
gives us samples of the official description of the 
migrating Irish, both the high brought low, and 
the lowly still lower. Here are a few of these 
official entries: 

"Sir Nicholas Comyn of Limerick numb on 
one side of dead palsy, accompanied only by his 
wife, Catherine, aged thirty-five, flaxen hair, of 
middle stature, and one maid servant. Honor 
MacNamara, aged twenty, brown hair, middle 
stature — having no substance." 

"Ignatius Stacpool of Limerick, orphant, eleven 
years of age, flaxen hair, full face, low of stature ; 
Catherine, his sister, orphant, age eight, flaxen 
hair, full face — having no substance.'* 

"James, Lord Dun Boyne in County Tipperary, 
describes himself as likely to be accompanied by 
twenty-one followers, and as having four cows, 
ten garans and two swine.*' 

The Lord and the commoner, the palsied old 

IIS 



IRELAND'S CASE 

man, and the toddling orphan child — all alike 
were driven forth from their homes, and by Brit- 
ain's brave soldiers goaded over the blood-stained 
flints to their Siberia. 

The Barony of Barren in Clare, to which the 
first batch of these unfortunates were consigned, 
was such a god-forsaken region that it was popu- 
larly said to have, not wood enough on which to 
hang a man, wate^ enough to drown him, nor 
earth enough to bury him. Beside it Siberia 
were Eden. 

The historian Morrison, a Britisher who was 
on the ground and saw for himself the horrors, 
records: "Neither the Israelites were more 
cruelly persecuted by Pharaoh, nor the innocent 
infants by Herod, nor the Christians by Nero, 
or any other of the pagan tyrants, than were the 
Roman Catholics of Ireland by these savage 
Commissioners." 

But be it noted England plundered and drove 
to starvation and death,entirely for this ungrate- 
ful people's good. Sir John Davies, who had 
planned the method of the Ulster Plantation, 
laid it down that — like every other crime ever 
committed by England — it was for the good of 
the people and the glory of God to rob them of 
their fruitful lands and banish them to ^e bar- 

ii6 



THE BRITISH GARRISON IN IRELAND 

ren wilds. Sir John in his historical tract says, 
**This transplanting of the natives is made by his 
Majesty like a father, rather than a lord or mon- 
arch. . . . So as his Majesty doth in this 
imitate the skillful husbandman who doth remove 
his fruit trees, not on purpose to extirpate and 
destroy, but that they may bring forth better 
and sweeter fruit!" 

If England roasted a man alive — as often she 
did — the virtuous Englishman proved to his own 
satisfaction that roasting alive was the most 
wholesome thing under Heaven for that fellow's 
constitution. And, of course, humbly, to God 
alone was the glory. That was always, of course, 
in the history of Britain. God is ever Britain's 
accomplice, before, during and after every vir- 
tuous British act. 

In this connection I set down here another fine 
illustration of England's pious way of sending 
people to Hell for their good and God's glory. 

After the conquest of Jamaica in 1655 — a^^d 
after thousands of the Irish had, through years 
before, been shipped into slavery, the Governor 
asked for a thousand girls from Ireland to be 
shipped there — to the most appalling kind of 
slavery. 

Secretary Thurloe's Correspondence, Vol. 4, 

117 



IRELAND'S CASE 

gives Henry Cromwell's reply to this modest re- 
quest — in his letter of September ii, 1655: 

"Concerninge the younge women, although we 
must use force in takeinge them up, yet it beinge 
so much for their owne goode and likely to be 
of soe great advantage to the publique, it is not 
in the least doubted you may have such number 
of them as you thinke fitt to make use upon this 
account. ... I desire to express as much 
zeal in this design as you would wish, and shall 
be as diligent in prosequution of any directiones 
. . . judgeinge it to be business of publique 
concernment. . . . Blessed be God, I do not 
finde many discouragements in my worke, and 
hope I shall not doe it soe longe as the Lord is 
pleased to keep my harte uprighte before him." 

And under date of September 18, 1655, Henry 
of the Uprighte Harte, writing from Kilkenny 
again to Thurloe, says in the course of his letter, 
**I shall not neede to repeat anythinge about the 
girles, not doubtinge but to answer your expec- 
tationes, to the full in that: and I think it might 
be of like advantage to your affaires 'there, and 
to ours heer if you should thinke fitt to sende 
1500 or 2000 young boys of from twelve to four- 
teen years of age, to the place aforementioned. 
We could well spare them, and they would be of 

118 



THE BRITISH GARRISON IN IRELAND 

use to you ; and who knowes but that it may be 
the meanes to make them Englishmen, I mean 
rather Christians." 

The justification of himself on the ground that 
the boys' enslaving might make them good Eng 
lishmen (which in the sight of God, meant, of 
course, good Christians) — and the tearing away 
and the carrying off of the girl children for the 
personal use of the swinish English planters in 
Jamaica, because it was "so much for their own 
good" ! — is a brilliancy that, of all men under 
Heaven, could burst forth only from the brain of 
an Englishman — whose harte the Lord is pleased 
to keep uprighte before Him. 

And this was the Cromwellian Settlement. 

Some authorities say that before the Cromwel- 
lian Settlement the proportion of the Irish lands 
still in the hands of the Irish was two-thirds of 
all Ireland. Still others say that as piuch as nine- 
tenths of the lands in three of the provinces 
had still been in the hands of the Irish. After 
the Cromwellian Settlement, Sir William Petty 
says that two-thirds of Ireland was owned by 
the British settlers, but another authority says 
that four-fifths of it was in the hands of the Brit- 
ish. 

Our zealous Christian conquerors always pro- 

119 



IRELAND'S CASE 

lessed that their Irish activities were prompted 
by their eagerness to bring home the truth and 
beauty of English Protestantism to the Irish 
Papist heathen, and turn his footsteps from Hell- 
ward to Heavenward. But as one old Irish his- 
torian recorded, the event proved that they were 
more anxious to make the Irish land turn Protes- 
tant than the Irish people. 

Says Dr. Smiles in his "History of Ireland": 
"The British colonists who settled in Ireland 
erected themselves into an Ascendancy, of the 
most despotic and tyrannical kind. In the course 
of time they possessed themselves of almost the 
entire soil of Ireland, treating the natives as 
Helots and slaves, and with a cruelty that has 
never been exceeded in any age or country." 

So Ireland was again settled. Connaught, 
containing the miserable remnant of the Irish 
nation, was a frightful scene of plague, sickness, 
starvation and death. And England was thank- 
ing God, with whom she was so intimate and so 
privileged, for the great mercy shown her — and 
for the proper retribution that He had meted out, 
through her. His humble instrument, to the Irish 
barbarian enemies of herself and Heaven. 

And Ireland was given into the charge of the 
volunteer British garrison. 

I20 



CHAPTER VIII. 
RESOURCES OF ENGLISH CIVILIZATION 

In Chapter II. I attempted a faint picture ot 
England's civilizing methods in Ireland. But 
some readers will object: The age of which you 
spoke was a barbarous one, anyhow. 

On the contrary, the age of which I spoke was 
England's golden age. 

And her methods of civilizing Ireland in that 
age were not isolated methods. They were the 
methods that England consistently followed in 
dealing with the "Irish Hottentots" (vide the late 
lamented Lord Salsbury's speeches) — the Hotten- 
tots, who, it may be remembered, had given civ- 
ilization, education, and the Christian faith to the 
greater part of Britain. 

Let us come down some centuries farther, and 
see how England's methods in Ireland have im- 
proved. For they really did improve as they 
went along. Readers will admit that, after they 
have had a glimpse of English methods in Ireland 
on the threshold of the Nineteenth Century. 

121 



IRELAND'S CASE 

Well, first, hear the testimony from the oppos- 
ing party. 

At that time Lord Moira was one of the many 
British Lords who enjoyed Ireland's confiscated 
lands. But, unlike most of his fellows, he had a 
human heart, instead of a stone, in his breast. Un- 
like the host of his fellows, he had realized that, 
after all, these Irish slaves were human beings. 
At length, he felt so revolted at the scenes going 
on in Ireland every day, that he, in the House of 
Lords, on the 226. November, 1797, had to express 
himself as follows: "What I have to speak of, 
are not solitary and isolated measures nor par- 
tial abuses, but what is adopted as the system of 
government ; I do not talk of a casual system, but 
of one deliberately determined on, and regularly 
persevered in . . . My Lords, I have seen in 
Ireland the most disgusting tyranny any nation 
ever groaned under. 

"I have seen the most wanton insults practised 
upon men of all ranks and conditions, the most 
grievous oppressions exercised in districts as 
quiet and free from disturbance as is this city of 
London. I have known a man, in order to ex- 
tort confession of a supposed crime or of the 
crime of some of his neighbors, picketted till he 
fainted; when he recovered, picketted until he 

122 



RESOURCES OF ENGLISH CIVILIZATION 

fainted again; and after that, picketted until he 
fainted yet again; and all upon mere suspicion. 
Many have been taken and hung up until half 
dead, and then threatened with repetition of this, 
unless they confessed imputed guilt. These 
were not particular acts of cruelty exercised by 
men abusing power committed to them, but 
form part of our system." 

Mark well, this British Lord resident in Ire- 
land takes care to emphasize and to repeat that 
the horrible cruelties to which the Irish were 
then, as always, subject, were merely the or- 
dinary system, used and recommended to be 
used, by Englishmen in ruling Irishmen. 

Lord Moira went on to tell how in pursuance 
oi an illegal proclamation, ordering any Irish 
people who were in possession of arms to give 
them up — "If anyone was suspected of having 
concealed weapons of defense, his house, furni- 
ture, and all property were burned." The local 
Government official, he said, arbitrarily named 
the numbers of arms that should be given up by 
each district — the numbers that he supposed, or 
pretended to suppose, each district to possess. If 
any district did not surrender all the arms for 
which it had pleased this man to rate it, a mili- 
tary party was sent out to collect the number 

123 



IRELAND'S CASE 

rated. And in execution of this, said Lord Moira, 
''as many as thirty houses were sometimes 
burned in one night." 

But a significant part of this testimony is the 
tail e:nd of it wherein he told their lordships that, 
in public speech, "for prudential reasons I wish 
to draw a veil over the more aggravated facts." 

The account of Lord Moira's speech may be 
found in the book (published in 1840) entitled, 
''Lights and Shadows of Whigs and Tories." 

It was in Ireland, in that self same year of 
i;97, that General Abercrombie's honest old 
Scotch heart revolted, and he wrote, "Every 
crime and cruelty that could be committed by 
Cossacks or Calmucks has been committed here 
. . . the abuses of all kinds that I found here 
can scarcely be believed or enumerated." 

It is only fair to add that the shocked author- 
ities gave particular attention to Abercrombie's 
complaint. Out of consideration for his revolted 
feelings, they relieved him of his command. 

From this bit of testimony alone, the reader 
may see clearly how far England's methods in 
Ireland kept pace with the march of civilization 
in the world at large. 

When Elizabeth, two hundred years but one, 
before that, was sending Carew to Ireland to 

124 



RESOURCES OF ENGLISH CIVILIZATION 

propagate; civilization in that benighted land, 
she authorized him "to put suspected Irish to the 
rack and to torture them when found conveni- 
ent." With the aforementioned march of civili- 
zation progressing during two hundred years of 
English inventiveness and English progress sup- 
plied the English civilizer in Ireland with rich 
choice of many improved forms of torture — all 
of which were in constant use in the declining 
years of the eighteenth century. 

In 1798, and the years preceding, when it 
was necessary to goad the people into a prema- 
ture rebellion, and pave the way for the Parlia- 
mentary Union, the torturers, both official and 
non-official, suffered from an embarrassment of 
riches. The Rev. James Gordon, Protestant 
Rector of Kiliegney in Wexford, relates some- 
thing of the stimulating means adopted; and 
among them mentions — ''Various other violent 
acts were committed such as to cut away pieces 
of men's ears, even sometimes the. whole ear, 
or part of the nose. The High Sheriff of Tipper- 
ary seized a gentleman named Wright, against 
whom there were no grounds of suspicion, had 
five hundred lashes administered to him, in the 
severest manner — and then confined him several 

125 



IRELAND'S CASE 

days without permitting his wounds to be 
dressed." 

The delightful tortures of picketting, the cat, 
and half hanging, for the purpose of extracting 
cunfessions, were so common as to pass unno- 
ticed. 

The triangle and the pitch cap were newer 
methods of persuasion in use then. 

The facetious plan of cropping off a man's ears, 
piece by piece, by way of stimulating his mem- 
ory, and developing his confidingness, became 
quite popular. 

Laceration of the back, either by flogging with 
a cat-o'-nine-tails, or by combing it with a steel- 
toothed comb, and then rubbing salt into the 
wounds, was fashionable. And burning of the 
hair with gun-powder was a new process of tor- 
ture that gave much satisfaction. 

Edward Hay, in his "History of the Insurrec- 
tion in Wexford," gives a description of this lat- 
ter refined amusement. He says that Mr. Perry, 
a Protestant (evidently suspected of sympathiz- 
ing with the rebels), was taken out by the troops, 
the sign of the cross cropped in his hair — from 
forehead to neck and from ear to ear, then gun- 
powder mixed through his hair and set on fire. 
This was repeated till every hair that remained 

126 



RESOURCES OF ENGLISH CIVILIZATION 

could be pulled out by the roots. Yet they still 
continued to burn it with the gun-powder lit by 
a candle — continually applied and continually 
burned till the entire scalp was burned away. 

For the brutal and lustful soldiery, free-quar- 
ters with all its attendant horrors, was provided 
in the homes of the country people. 

It is no wonder that numbers of the poor, ig- 
norant, suffering, tortured, country people when, 
driven to madness by such fearful practices, 
burst into disorganized revolt, and in several 
places, before leaders brought them under control, 
massacred hundreds of the Anglo-Irish Protes- 
tants — many of whom were innocent of any 
crime whatsoever against their Catholic neigh- 
bors. Only they were of those who had driven 
these people to their frenzy. This, though the 
work of men driven to madness, is the saddest 
thing in the Rebellion of '98 — to good Irishmen 
far sadder and more painful than the endless tor- 
turing and massacring of hosts of their own peo- 
ple by the English and the Anglo-Irish. 

When one ponders on the sights that the agon- 
ized people were daily seeing around them, the 
horrors inflicted upon their kith and their kin — 
a father, for instance, seeing his child of twelve 
years wantonly cloven through the skull by the 

127 



IRELAND'S CASE 

sword of the gentlemanly English officer to 
whom the child had opened the door — ^the cord- 
bound brother compelled to witness his sister 
outraged by a troop of British beasts — ^it is hard 
to realize how, when at length the inevitable 
frenzy seized them, and that, spurning conse- 
quences and seeing only red vengeance, they 
arose up, they could be restrained from slaking 
their thirst for vengeance in murderous deeds 
done indifferently upon innocent and guilty of 
the class that had evoked their frenzy. 

But notwithstanding that Irishmen must record 
their sorrow and shame that their people, 
even in the madness to which they were driven, 
should do the deeds that were appropriate only 
to the oppressor, it is, yet, a source of consola- 
tion to think that even in their frenzy these men 
did not altogether forget Irish manhood. Hear 
again the Protestant Rector, Rev. James Gor- 
don — "Amid all the atrocities, the chastity of 
the fair sex was respected by the insurgents. I 
have not been able to find one instance to the 
contrary in the County Wexford, though many 
beautiful young women were absolutely at their 
mercy." He also testified that "Women and 
children were not put to death by the insurgents, 
excepting in the one instance of the burning of 

128 



RESOURCES OF ENGLISH CIVILIZATION 

Scullabogue barn (where about 200 Anglo-Irish 
refugees were burned to death). 

After the Rebellion had broken out, the policy 
of torture and of horror was, of course, not only 
continued, but improved upon. 

The higher officials who could not be in the 
field to enjoy the fun there, because they had to 
direct operations from Dublin Castle, were not, 
nevertheless, to be deprived of their share of the 
entertainment. Sir Jonah Harrington says, 
"Dead bodies of insurgents sabred by Roden's 
dragons were brought in carts to Dublin, with 
some prisoners tied together. And on a hot day, 
these bodies, with wounds gaping, were stretched 
out in the castle yard in view of the Chief Secre- 
tary's windows." 

Disembowelling of rebels — especially of leaders 
or supposed leaders, was a favorite form of relax- 
ation, for the English troops and their officers. 
While General Lake sat at dinner, he was enter- 
tained by the hanging, and then the mutilating, 
of a rebel, in front of his window. 

Illuminative, of British refinement and noble 
nature was the treatment accorded the body of 
Father Murphy (the leader of the Rebels) after 
his death in the battle of Arklow. Mr. George 
Taylor, in his Historical Account of the. Wexford 

129 



IRELAND'S CASE 

Hebellion, says, "Lord Mountnorris and some of 
his troopers found the body of the perfidious 
priest Murphy, who had so much deceived him 
and the country. Being exasperated, his Lord- 
ship ordered the head struck off and the body 
thrown into a house that was burning, exclaim- 
ing, at the same time, 'Let his body go where his 
soul is/ " Particularly observe that his Lordship 
did not for a moment forget he was a gentleman. 
He was only exasperated. A noble English Lord 
never stoops to anything below exasperation. 
One of the common herd could afford to indulge 
in a paroxysm of brutal savagery at the sight of 
a dead patriot leader — but not my noble lord. 

When the exasperated gentleman had ridden 
away, a body of the Ancient Britons Regiment 
came along. The news that it was the body of 
Father Murphy which they saw burning there, 
naturally ruffled the temper of these English 
gentlemen. And a man not partial to the insur- 
gents, Rev. James Gordon, in his History of the 
Eebellion, written five years later, tells us that 
these English gentlemen, to sooth their ruffled 
temper, "cut open the dead body of Father Mur- 
phy, took out his heart, roasted the body, and 
oiled their boots with the grease that dripped 
from it," — "Captain Holmes of the Durham Reg- 

130 



RESOURCES OF ENGLISH CIVILIZATION 

iment/' says Mr. Gordon, "told me in the pres- 
ence of several, that he himself had assisted at 
cutting open the breast with a hatchet and 
pulling out the heart." He who, striving to lift 
from his country the pleasant yoke of Britain, ex- 
asperates British gentlemen, merits some such 
impressive British rebuke. 

No quarter was given to rebels, or persons 
taken as rebels, with or without arms. Just as 
was enacted by the English Parliament a century 
and a half before, no quarter for the Irish was 
still the English rule of warfare. 

The rule, too, applied to wounded and dying, 
equally with those who were still militant and 
whole. In Enniscorthy thirty wounded and dy- 
ing insurgents in one house, which was being used 
as a hospital, were burned to death. One Anglo- 
Irish historian excuses the soldiers from deliber- 
ately burning these men to death. He says that 
the house was fired by the wadding of the sol- 
diers' guns setting fire to the beds, when the sol- 
diers were shooting the patients in bed! 

On the attitude of the general body of the 
Anglo-Irish, the Ascendency party, toward the 
mere Irish whom they trampled. Hunter Gowan^ 
the leader of the band of Yeos in Wexford, gave 
fair illustration^ We find him returning from one 

131 



IRELAND'S CASE 

of his forays at the head of his Yeos, with a 
rebel's finger as a trophy impaled on the point of 
his sword. Mr. Gowan'made a friendly call at a 
rectory which they passed, and playfully fright- 
ened the young ladies with the funny object on 
his sword point — poking it in their faces, chasing 
them through the house with it, and humorously 
dropping the rebel's finger down inside the bosom 
of one young lady's dress, causing her to faint. 
To wind up a great day's adventure by fitting cel- 
ebration, he stirred the punch at dinner with the 
Croppie's finger. 

For, cruel and savage as were the methods of 
the English in Ireland, those of the Anglo-Irish 
(the British who had been here for generations 
or centuries) were sometimes infinitely worse. 

The noted Sir John Moore, who had been sent 
to Ireland in command of English troops, report- 
ed that he found the presence of troops necessary 
not to check the people in general, but rather to 
check the Anglo-Irish Yeos in their career of car- 
nage. These Yeos, raiding the country in bands, 
oftentimes brought with them on their excursions 
a professional hangman to aid their worthy work. 

In Clogheen, Sir John Moore found the High 
Sheriff having the streets lined with country peo- 
ple on their knees, and with hats off, while h^ 

132 



RESOURCES OF ENGLISH CIVILIZATION 

was whipping a poor devil to death. The High 
Sheriff confided to Sir John that he had "flogged 
the truth out of many respectable persons." 

With horror and disgust at England's inhuman 
work in Ireland, Moore resigned his command 
and left the country. 

Teeling, in his "Narrative of the Rebellion," 
pictures for us some of the sufferings of the Irish 
people during this terrible time. As exemplify- 
ing the small things for which great punishment 
was given, he tells how one Bergan in the City of 
Drogheda, being convicted of rebellious tenden- 
cies, because found in possession of a small gold 
ring with shamrock device, was, in the public 
street, stripped of his clothes, placed upon a cart, 
and torn with a cat-o'-nine-tails not only till he 
gasped his last gasp, but "till long after the final 
spark was extinct." 

In Drogheda also, a boy, as heroic of will as he 
was frail of body, being sentenced to receive five 
hundred lashes for refusing to make some dis- 
closure that was sought from him, bore up, dur- 
ing nearly half of the punishment without show- 
ing a single sign of wincing. Then, finding him- 
self unable to bear any more without yielding, 
and thus satisfying his executioners, he pretended 
to make a confession, sent them off upon a blind 

133 



IRELAND'S CASE 

trail, thus getting time and opportunity to cut 
his throat before the brutes could again resume 
his slow execution. 

At headquarters in Dublin, the Government of- 
ficials ran a torture factory, the, horrors of which 
have seldom, if ever, been surpassed in the annals 
of the most savage and most barbarous nations. 
"The world has been astonished at the close o^ 
the Eighteenth Century," says Teeling, ''with acts 
which the eye views with horror and heart sick- 
ens to record. Not only on the most trivial but 
the most groundless occasions, torture was in- 
flicted without mercy on every age and on every 
condition. In the center of the city the heart- 
rending exhibition was presented of a human be- 
ing rushing from the infernal depot of torture 
and death, his person besmeared with a burning 
preparation of turpentine and pitch, plunging, in 
his distraction, into the Liffy, and terminating at 
once his sufferings and his life." 

These few instances of English methods in 
Ireland on the edge of the Nineteenth Century, 
are only samples of thousands of such that oc- 
curred. They are quite enough for my purpose — ■ 
which is to give a plain picture without revolt- 
ing the reader by still more horrible details. 

If tJais method of ruling, crushing, and tortur- 

134 



RESOURCES OF ENGLISH CIVILIZATION 

ing of a weak and beaten people, were practised 
by Russia in Poland, or by Turkey in Armenia, 
or by some uncivilized barbarian rulers, over a 
beaten tribe in the jungles of Africa, it might 
well cause the world to shudder. But it was the 
method employed to a people who had preserved 
and given back light and learning to Europe — by 
a people who inform us that they are not only the 
greatest and most powerful in the world, but also 
the champions of liberty, propagators of civiliza- 
tion, and sponsers of Christ's teachings, to the 
darkened regions of earth. 

One's mind naturally turns back to Cromwell, 
with upturned eyes disclaiming the renown and 
glory of butchering the women, men and children 
of Drogheda, informing his Parliament and his 
Heaven that all the glory for the noble, work was 

God's alone. It is the Briton's ingenious way of 
making his glory work for him at double com- 
pound interest, by the ingenious device of ten- 
dering it to his Maker, on the tacit understanding 
(always observed among gentlemen) that it will 
be handed back bigger — v/hile the world at the 
same time swells it still more, by admiration of 
his wondrous humility. England's sword is still 
wielded by Cromwell ; and in England's voice his 

135 



IRELAND'S CASE 

voice yet speaks. In the English soul Cromwell 
never dies. 

Lord Salisbury, referring to the innumerable 
wars of extermination upon the petty tribesK>f 
India, said, "They are but the bloody foam on the 
crest of the advancing tide of British civilization." 

Oh! Civilization, what British blessings are 
committed in thy name 1 



136 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE PARLIAMENTARY UNION OF 

IRELAND WITH BRITAIN 

The simple American view of Ireland's relations 
with England was well illustrated recently by 
the Editor of a leading review when, in explain- 
ing away (for his readers' benefit) my showing 
of Ireland's right to independent nationhood, he 
informed his public that, in 1800, Irishmen volun- 
tarily resigned their own Irish Parliament, and 
eagerly united with England. 

Let us see. 

Although Ireland was officially conquered to 
Britain centuries before, the Island was alleged 
to have a Parliament of its own, under the Brit- 
ish Crown, up to the year 1800. 

It was, of course, a Parliament of, and for, the 
British in Ireland. The mere Irish had no say 
in it — except for an insignificantly brief period. 
Had no right even to vote for a member of it. It 
was not considered that they whose land this was, 
and who constituted six-sevenths of the popu- 
lation of the land, could presume to take even the 

137 



IRELAND'S CASE 

humblest part in governing their own country. 
The Parliament was for half a million British in 
Ireland — to hold three million Irish in subjection. 
Moreover, of the 300 members, only J2 were real- 
ly elected. Three-fourths of its members were 
just appointed by the Borough owners, the Brit- 
ish owners who owned Irish towns. 

I called it an alleged Parliament. It was only 
at rare intervals that the Anglo-Irish who owned 
and ran this Parliament dared assert their right 
to make it a Parliament in reality, as well as in 
name. For centuries it was held in the strangle- 
liold of Poyning's Law — a law which forbade it 
to initiate any legislation — only gave it liberty 
to legislate under the direction and command of 
the English Parliament — to pass into law what- 
ever the English Parliament recommended — and 
to refrain from legislating upon all things that 
the English Parliament forbade it to legislate 
upon. 

Under this state of things naturally Ireland's 
"v^ oes increased with the years. Just before the 
Anglo-Irish Parliament took heart to shake from 
its shoulders its Old Man of the Sea, the English 
Parliament which paralyzed it, Hely Hutchinson, 
speak"ne in the Irish House of Commons (in 
J779) said: ''Can 1;he history of any other fruit-. 

J3S 



THE PARLIAMENTARY UNION 

ful country on the globe, enjoying peace for 
eighty years, and not visited by plague or pestil- 
ence, produce so many recorded instances of the 
poverty and the wretchedness, of the reiterated 
want and misery of the lower order of people. 
There is no such example in ancient or modern 
story/' 

In 1782, when Britain's hands were filled with 
an American problem, Henry Grattan and the 
great army of Ireland's Volunteers, 100,000 
strong, demanded the independence of their Par- 
liament. And as they had in their hands, when 
making the request, a hundred thousand muskets 
their request was graciously granted. During 
the succeeding years, this Anglo-Irish Parlia- 
ment, acting independently of the British Parli- 
ament, was enabled to do wonderful things for 
the restoration of Ireland's commerce and man- 
ufactures. Many of the disabilities of the Irish 
Catholics, too, were, under it, removed — and an 
Irishman was acknowledged to have some citizen 
rights. 

But, it did not suit England's book to have any 
body of people in Ireland, even their own Anglo- 
Irish kin, running Ireland with profit to Ireland 
— and consequently a curtailment of English 
profit. So, the mistake must be corrected. And 

139 



IRELAND'S CASE 

the best way to correct it was bodily to remove 
the cause of the trouble. Parliament, both in 
reality and in name, must be taken from Ireland 
altogether. So, Prime Minister Pitt of England 
conspired with his good instruments, Cornwallis, 
Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and Castlereagh, the 
Irish Secretary, to attain the desired end. For 
this splendidly corrupt object Pitt fortunately 
had, in Cornwallis and Castlereagh, a pair of 
splendidly corrupt tools. 

To undermine the prestige of the Irish Parlia- 
ment and prove its incompetence for governing 
Ireland, they first goaded the Irish people into a 
premature rebellion — by such methods as those 
described by Lord Moira. And they then 
launched their campaign for giving to the Eng- 
lish Parliament the sole right of directly govern- 
ing this ungovernable Island. 

That the Anglo-Irish inhabitants of the Island 
would not easily yield their right Pitt and his 
instruments knew well. But that a large portion 
of their representatives was purchasable, they 
divined. So they set themselves enthusiastically 
to the congenial work of bribing and debasing 
right and left, and buying men's souls. 

Lies, perjury, and fraud were the British stock- 
in-trade during all of Britain's connection with 

140 



THE PARLIAMENTARY UNION 

Ireland. But there was never another period in 
vvhich so much baseness was crowded into so 
little time as now, when they were debasing their 
own kin and robbing them of their "rights/* No 
other scandal of British administration, before or 
since, ever equalled this one of buying the Union. 
The immediate chief instruments, Cornwallis and 
Castlereagh, were probably no worse than any 
other English administrators in Ireland — only 
that this large job gave them an exceptional op- 
portunity to distinguish themselves. 

Castlereagh indeed partly redeemed himself 
by living to cut his throat. 

Cornwallis, through all the vile business, took 
the superior stand of the hypocrite who thinks he 
conceals his hypocrisy beneath the cloak of 
frankness. He writes to a friend, "My occupa- 
tion is of the most unpleasant nature, bargaining 
and jobbing with the most corrupt people under 
Heaven" (the Anglo-Irish). *T despise and hate 
myself for ever engaging in such dirty work." In 
another place he confesses that he is '^involved 
in this dirty business beyond all bearing.*' 

The people were wheedled, coaxed, threatened, 
and bribed, into signing petitions in favor of 
Union with England. Barrington tells us that, 
under promise of pardon, felons in the jails were 

141 



IREOiND'S CASE 

got to sign the Union petition. Everyone hold- 
ing a government job in the country had not only 
to sign the petition himself, but was compelled 
to make his relatives and the relatives of their 
relatives sign it likewise. 

Not merely those who held positions under 
the government were required to do this; but to 
every man who hoped or dreamt of ever stand- 
ing chance of a position under the government, 
it was plainly intimated that he and his relatives' 
relatives must become petitioners. Mixed bribes 
and threats were scattered over the land like seed 
corn — falling upon, sticking to, and germinating 
in thousands upon thousands of every rank from 
the public hangman all the way up to the Arch- 
bishop of the Established Church. 

The pro-British historian, Lecky, says, "Ob- 
scure men in unknown political places were dis- 
missed because they or some of their relatives 
declined to support it.'* He says, "The whole 
force of Government patronage in all branches 
was steadily employed. The formal and author- 
itative announcement was made, that, though 
defeated Session after Session and Parliament 
after Parliament — the act of Union would al- 
ways be reintroduced — and that support of it 
would hereafter be considered the main test by 

142 



THE PARLIAMENTARY UNION 

which all claims to government favor would be 
determined." — ^"Everything in the government of 
the crown in Ireland," Lecky further states, **in 
the church, in the army, in the law, in the rev- 
enue, was uniformly and steadily devoted to the 
single purpose of carrying the Union. From the 
great noblemen who were bought for marquis- 
ates and ribands; from the (Protestant) Arch- 
bishop of Cashel who agreed to support the Union 
on being promised the reversion of the See of 
Dublin and a seat in the Imperial House of 
Lords, the virus of corruption extended and de- 
scended through every rank and title, and satur- 
ated the political system, including even crowds 
of obscure men who had it in their power to as- 
sist or obstruct addresses on the subject.*' 

Men who dared be independent and stand for 
tiieir rights, were hounded and persecuted and 
dismissed from office. Even the highest in rank, 
such as the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a 
Prime Sergeant and Privy Chancellor, were 
kicked out for daring to deny England's divine 
right to do wrong. 

Men who refused to be bribed were forced out 
of their seats in the Irish Parliament by every 
dirty means known to dirty men. Their own 
instruments, their own official aides, even, were 

J43 



IRELAND'S CASE 

put into office and put into Parliament for the 
openly avowed purpose of voting away Ireland's 
rights. Englishmen who never before had given 
any thought to Ireland, were actually imported 
to sit as Irish members of Parliament — and vote 
away Ireland's Parliament to England. 

Some of these latter rascals never saw — some- 
times hardly knew — the name of the Irish Bor- 
ough for which they sat. When one of them, one 
day, presented himself at the English House of 
Parliament and requested some privilege that 
was of courtesy accorded there to members of 
the Irish Parliament, he was asked for what Irish 
Borough he sat. *'By Heaven," he replied, "the 
name of the devilish place 'as escaped me, — But 
if you bring me the Irish Directory I believe I 
can pick it out." 

They overawed patriotic people who ventured 
to meet any protest against the proposed Union. 
Barrington relates how, on the occasion of an 
Anti-Union meeting in King's County, Darley, 
the High Sheriff, and Major Rogers (acting of 
course under instructions from Dublin Castle) 
placed two six pounders, charged with grape 
shot, opposite the Court-house where the meet- 
ing was being held — bringing England's logic to 
bear on the misguided ones who thought they 

144 



THE PARLIAMENTARY UNION 

could better know than England, what was for 
Ireland's benefit. 

The Habeas Corpus Act was suspended. 

Martial law was proclaimed. 

England stationed in Ireland, 126,000 soldiers. 

All constitutional guarantee was annulled. 

The use of torture was frequently availed of. 

Meetings of the people were dispersed by mil- 
itary force. 

Offices and commands were trafficked in. 

Every foul devise that the most ingeniously 
mean-minded tools could contrive was employed 
against Irish liberty — or Anglo-Irish liberty. 

And by use of all conceivable and inconceiv- 
able mean devices they managed, at length, to 
secure a bare majority in favor of the Union — 
162 out of 303 members. One hundred and six- 
teen of these 162 were their own salaried tools — 
placemen. 

They carried their "Union.^* It has been stated 
that as much as eight thousand pounds was paid 
for one vote, Henry Grattan is authority for it 
that, of those who voted in favor of the Union 
with England, not more than seven were un- 
bribed. Cornwallis had no illusions about the 
quality of the men whom he purchased — knew 
r^'ght well that they could be just as faithless to 

145 



IRELAND'S CASE 

him, despite his gold, as they were to their 
adopted country, despite their duty. He wrote, 
"I believe that half of our majority would be as 
much delighted as any of our opponents, if the 
measure could be defeated." 

Place, title, and gold, were the inducements 
for sacrificing Ireland at England's bidding. As 
reward for good work done — or to be done — 
twenty-eight Irish peerages were created. Six 
Irish peers got English peerages. Twenty Irish 
peers were elevated in rank. New and lucrative 
jobs, offices, government appointments, were cre- 
ated — for bestowal on those who rendered "serv- 
ices." 

In those days the boroughs in Ireland were 
"owned" by Lordly proprietors who put in for 
them such puppet members of Parliament as 
they pleased. In 1782 out of 300 members, only 
y2 were really elected — and of course only one- 
seventh of the people in Ireland (the British 
portion) got a chance at electing those. This 
ownership came to be recognized by law! And 
to compensate eighty titled Borough owners in 
Ireland (who owned one hundred and sixty mem- 
bers) an act was passed appropriating for them 
£1,260,000 — being at the rate of about £8,000 
for each member. 

146 



THE PARLIAMENTARY UNION 

And, crowning joke of all the grim jokes played 
upon Ireland by England, this million and quar- 
ter for greasing the groove down which Ireland's 
Parliament was to be skidded to England — was 
added to the Irish National Debt! 

Lord Ely who had at first been opposed to the 
L'nion, but came finally to see the light and voted 
for it, received £45,000 of this for his Boroughs. 

These moneys were paid as "compensation" 
for "disturbance" caused, or to be caused, or in 
danger of being caused, by the Union. And not 
only Anglo Irishmen but likewise every pocket- 
picking Englishman and hungry Scotchman 
who could get near it, fought and struggled and 
mauled one another, for the chance of getting 
a hand in the Compensation bag. 

Barrington records that even the necessary 
woman of the English Privy Council asked "com- 
pensation" from Ireland for the extra trouble 
which the influx of Irish Privy Councellors would 
cause in her department! 

And the Lord Lieutenant's official rat catcher 
insisted on the right to get his paw in the bag 
a £ compensation for "decrease of employment." 
Why the Union with England should affect this 
gentleman's employment is not stated — but it 
is easy to suppose that he foresaw the certainty 

M7 



IRELAND'S CASE 

of droves of British rats quitting the sinking 
ship. 

Daniel O'Connell once said, that he could not, 
under Heaven, apprehend how it was that they 
forgot to charge against Ireland the price of the 
razor with which Castlereagh afterwards cut his 
throat. 

And this is the wonderful story of Ireland's 
voluntary and eager Union with England. It is 
a fair illustration of England's nice honor, clean 
handedness, clean mindedness, in dealing with 
the island that was and is "dependent on and 
protected by England." 

The carrying of the Union the reader sees, re- 
flected nearly as much credit upon England's 
nice honor as did the Treaty of Limerick upon 
the pledged faith and honor of the British crown. 



148 



CHAPTER X. 
OUR ENGLISH LAND LAWS. 

In Ireland we had not the Feudal System 
vfhich obtained in England and in Continental 
countries. Our lands were, practically speaking, 
the common property of the Chief and the mem- 
bers of the clan. 

When England had succeeded in killing off or 
banishing the Chiefs, to English landlords were 
granted the stolen lands. And such members of 
the clan as still survived and were permitted to 
live as "tenants * upon their lands had to begin 
paying a tribute called "rent" to the British over- 
lords. They were at once reduced to serfdom. 

The Irish "tenants" were not only morally 
owners of the lands, but under the overlordship 
of their British landlords they still bought and 
sold the lands among themselves. It is of the 
utmost importance to note that in Ireland the 
landlord took no part in improving the land, or 
in putting up buildings upon it. He did abso- 
lutely nothing but sit down in his Irish castle, 
or his London Club, or Continental Gambling 
Hell, and accept his rents. The rule for rent- 
fixing was that the tenant should be made to pay 

149 



IRELAND'S CASE 

from the lands every penny that could possibly 
be squeezed out of him. If he was foolish 
enough to drain and improve his land, and thus 
make it yield a better crop, his rent was immedi- 
ately raised — because he was now able to pay 
more. This vile system of penalizing industry 
killed ambition in the serf's soul. If he could 
v/ring even the most wretched living from his 
lands, after paying the extortionate rent, the dis- 
heartened tenant had to be fatalistically content. 
His lot, throughout the more barren portion of 
Ireland, was wretched beyond description. 

Swift, in his day, was forced to cry out, 
"Rents are squeezed out of the clothes and 
dwellings, the blood and vitals of the tenants, 
who live worse than English beggars." 

If the tenant failed in his efforts to raise the 
rent by hook or crook (and in hundreds of thou- 
sands of cases he raised it not from his land, but 
from outside sources, often emigrating to Eng- 
land, Scotland and America for the purpose) or 
if the landlord wanted the land for some favorite, 
or if the tenant refused to give his labor free to 
the landlord, disobeyed or otherwise displeased 
the landlord, or broke one of the many tyran- 
nical "rules of the estate," he got notice to quit — 
was evicted from the land that he owned, from 
the house that he or his forefathers had raised — 
his home was tumbled down and he and his fam- 

150 



OUR ENGLISH LAND LAWS 

i!y were cast upon the road (without, of coarse, 
any penny of compensation), there to starve or 
die. 

The brutal "rules of the estate" often almost 
forbade the tenant to breathe without the land- 
lord's permission. On many estates the tenant 
dare not, under penalty of eviction, marry, or 
permit any of his family to marry, without a li- 
cense from the landlord's Agent. The tenant had 
to give to the landlord, the Agent, and the bailiff, 
all the free labor that they chose to demand. On 
many estates, the tenant was forbidden to keep 
a lodger, to harbor a visitor, to give a night's 
shelter to a beggar, or to any homeless one. On 
some estates the tenant was forbidden to har- 
bor even a relative. Butt in his "The Irish Land 
and the Irish People," instances the case of a 
widow being evicted for the crime of having 
brought a widowed daughter to live with her. 

The landlord would not have on his estate any 
such criminal hospitality. Because it encouraged 
pauperdom — for which he should have to pay his 
share in poor-tax. And, these people had no 
right to squander on worthless vagabonds, money 
that were better employed trying to keep the He- 
brew wolf from their Lord's door. 

To offer shelter and share of their bread to the 
wretched being, or family, that their landlord had 
cast out, was especially to invite their own d^ath 



IRELAND'S CASE 

sentence. As illustrating this, let me quote from 
A. M. Sullivan's "New Ireland," the case of 
the trial before Chief Baron Pigott of some ten- 
ants who were accused of the manslaughter of 
a little boy — the manslau^^hter being caused by 
their having forcibly expelled him from their 
house, and let him die of exposure — under terror 
of being themselves expelled for violating the 
"rules of the estate." The happening occurred 
on the Kerry estate of Marquis of Lansdowne. 
The orphan boy was Denis Shea, twelve years 
old. 

"His mother at one time held a little dwelling 
from which she was expelled. His father was 
dead. His mother had left him, and he was 
alone and unprotected. He found refuge with 
his grandmother, who held a little farm, from 
which she was evicted by the landlord in con- 
sequence of her harboring this poor boy — as the 
agent of the property had given public notice 
to the tenantry that expulsion from their farms 
would be the penalty inflicted upon them if 
they harbored any persons having no residence 
on the estate. These cases, not of eviction, but 
cases where eviction did not occur, showed that 
the tenantry were, because of the extraordinary 
powers conferred by law on landlords, in such 
a state of serfdom, that the mother could not 
receive her daughter — that the grandmother 



OUR ENGLISH LAND LAWS 

could not receive her own grandchild unless that 
child was a tenant on the estate. And the re- 
sult was this, that the poor boy, without a house 
to shelter him, was sought to be forced into 
the house of a relative in a terrible night of 
storm and rain. He was immediately pushed 
out again, he staggered on a little, fell to the 
ground, and the next morning was found cold, 
stiff and dead. The persons who drove tbe poor 
boy out were tried for the offence of being ac- 
cessories to his death; and their defence was 
that what they did was done under the terror 
of 'the rule of the estate' and that they meant 
no harm to the boy. They were found guilty 
of manslaughter and sentenced." 

And while these wretched victims of the "rule 
of the estate" were enjoying jail, the framer of 
the rule, the boy's real murderer, was nonchal- 
antly throwing his dice in his gambling resort. 

Mitchell, in talking of the evicting horror, 
gives a terse and terrible summary of the hap- 
penings upon one estate as the result of one 
eviction crop: 

"At an eviction in 1854, on a property under 
the management of Marcus Keane, James O'Gor- 
nian, one of the tenants evicted, died on the road- 
side. His wife and children were sent to the 
workhouse, where they died shortly afterwards. 

"John Corbet, a tenant on another townland, 



IRELAND^S CASE 

was evicted by the same agent. He died on the 
roadside. His wife had died previous to the evic- 
tion; his ten children were sent into the work- 
house and there died. 

"Michael McMahon, evicted at the same time, 
was dragged out of bed, to the roadside, where 
he died of want the next day. His wife died of 
want previous to the eviction, and his children, 
eight in number, died in a few years in the work- 
house." 

How is that for fruit of those beneficent Brit- 
ish laws which it is the inestimable privilege of 
the Irish barbarians to live under? 

And be it remembered not only did England 
back up this fearful state of things in Ireland 
with all the power of her legislature and well- 
chosen judiciary, but her brave troops, in all 
their red and royal glittering splendor, with rifles 
and bayonets, marched out behind the landlord 
and bailiffs to the noble work of evicting from 
their hovels these miserable people — and took 
position in front and on flank of the wretched 
hovels where the death sentence — as the eviction 
was usually known— was to be executed. For 
at the beck of the British landlord, the British 
army was ever held in readiness to lend the im- 
posing terrors of its presence at the committal 
of these awful crimes against God and God's 
most miserable people. 

154 



OUR ENGLISH LAND LAWS 

Foreigners can hardly believe that earth's 
greatest and most glorious empire could so dis- 
grace and degrade its force as to lend them, year 
after year, week after week, day after day, for 
exhibitions that would be ludicrous if they were 
not fraught with such awful consequence to the 
condemned, who were thereby losing their land, 
their home, their all — sometimes, too, their rea- 
son and their life! I talk of what I myself have 
seen — what who in Ireland has not seen? 

To convey to strangers a picture of what an 
Irish eviction is like, 1 shall set down here de- 
scriptions of a few of them given by spectators. 
The first is from the Right Rev. Dr. McNulty. 
Bishop of Meath — and is copied from Mitchell : 

"In the very first year of our ministry, as a 
missionary priest in this diocese, we were wit- 
ness of a cruel and inhuman eviction, which even 
still makes our heart bleed as often as we allow 
ourselves to think of it. 

**Seven hundred human beings were driven 
from their homes in one day, and set adrift on the 
world, to gratify the whim of one who, before 
God and man, probably deserved less considera- 
tion than the last and least of them. The Crow- 
bar Brigade employed on the occasion to extin- 
guish the hearth fires and demolish the homes, in- 
dustriously worked at their awful calling until 
evening. 



IRELAND'S CASE 

"Then an incident occurred that varied the 
monotony of the ghastly work. — Tiiey stopped 
suddenly, and recoiled panic-stricken from two 
dwellings which they were directed to destroy 
with the rest. A frightful typhus fever held 
those houses in its grasp, and had already brought 
pestilence and death to some of the inmates. 
They supplicated the agent to spare these houses 
a little longer; but the agent was inexorable, and 
insisted that they also should be levelled. He 
ordered a large winnowing-sheet to be put over 
the beds on which the fever victims lay — fortu- 
nately, they happened to be delirious at the time 
— and then directed the house to be unroofed 
carefully and slowly, because, he said, he very 
much disliked the bother of a coroner's inquest. 
I administered the Sacrament of the Church to 
four of these fever victims next day; and, save 
the above-mentioned winnowing-sheet, there was 
not then a roof nearer to them than the canopy 
of Heaven. 

"The horrible scenes I then witnessed I must 
remember all my life long. The wailing of wom- 
en — the screaming, the terror, the consternation 
of children — the speechless agony of honest, in- 
dustrious men — wrung tears of grief from all who 
saw and heard them. The heavy rains that usu- 
ally attend the autumnal equinox descended in 
cold, copious showers throughout the night, 



OUR ENGLISH LAND LAWS 

bringing home to those helpless sufferers the aw- 
ful realities of their condition. 

"I visited them next morning, and rode from 
place to place administering to them what com- 
fort and consolation I could. The appearance 
of men, women, and children, as they emerged 
from the ruins of their former homes — saturated 
with rain, blackened and besmeared with soot, 
revealed in every member cold and misery — pre- 
sented positively the most appalling spectacle I 
ever looked on. They were driven from the land 
on which Providence had placed them; and, in 
the state of society surrounding them, every walk 
of life was rigidly closed against them. What 
v/as the result? After battling in vain with pri- 
vation and pestilence, they at last graduated from 
the workhouse to the tomb; and in little more 
than three years nearly one-fourth of them lay 
quietly in their graves." 

The scenes and happenings here described by 
Dr. McNulty were only such as were become 
commonplace in every corner of Ireland. 

For, be it noted that, sometimes, 70,000 crea- 
tures in one year underwent the foregoing fate. 

The next I give is a description of the great 
clearance at Glenveigh, in my own County of 
Donegal. 

There the landlord, Adair, in a fit of spite 
against his tenants, determined to clear every 

157 



IRELAND'S CASE 

miserable soul in the countryside from their 
home and their lands, and throw them as beg- 
gars on the beggared world around them. 

"It was early in February, that the poor peo- 
ple first knew of the tragic fate that awaited 
them; some realized its terrible import, but the 
majority did not. In that remote and lonely 
region, they had never heard that any man could 
possess such power — they owed no rent; they 
had done no man wrong. In a couple of months 
a large force of police and soldiers, with tents 
and baggage, marched on Glenveigh, and on the 
night of Sunday, April 7, had closed in around 
the place, occupying or commanding the entranc- 
es or passes. Still the hapless people, in fatal 
confidence, slumbered on. In the early morning 
of Monday, the sight of the red-coats and the glit- 
tering bayonets gave the signal of alarm, and 
from house to house, and hill to hill, a halloo was 
sent afar. Soon there arose on the morning air 
a wail that chilled even the sternest heart, and 
there burst from the women and children a cry 
of agony that pierced the heavens." 

The Derry Standard, the Presbyterian organ of 
the Northwest, reported the eviction. A. M. Sul- 
livan in *'New Ireland" quotes the report. Read it, 
and bless the benign rule that God grants Ire- 
lund the blessing to enjoy — and the benign ruler 



OUR ENGLISH LAND LAWS 

who sends his gallant war-heroes, in all of war's 
panoply, to help an Englishman wreak his spite 
on the most pitiable of God's creatures. 

"The first eviction was one peculiarly distress- 
ing, and the terrible reality of the law suddenly 
burst in surprise on the spectators. Having ar- 
rived at Lough Barra, the police were halted, and 
the sheriff, with a small escort, proceeded to the 
house of a widow named McAward, aged 60 
years, living with whom were six daughters and 
a son. Long before the house was reached, loud 
cries were heard piercing the air, and soon the 
figures of the poor widow and her daughters were 
observed outside the house, where they gave 
vent to their grief in strains of touching agony. 
The Agent's men, who had been brought from a 
distance, immediately fell to levelling the house 
to the ground. The scene then became indescrib- 
able. 

"The bereaved widow and her daughters were 
frantic with despair. Throwing themselves on 
the ground, they became insensible, and burst 
out in the old Irish wail — then heard by many 
for the first time — their terrifying cries resound- 
ing along the mountainside for many miles. They 
had been deprived of the little spot dear to them 
with associations of the past — and with poverty 
before them, and only the blue sky to shelter 
them, they naturally lost all hope, and those who 



IRELAND'S CASE 

v/itnessed their agony will never forget the sight. 
Every heart was touched, and tears of sympathy 
flowed from many. In a short time we with- 
drew from the scene, leaving the widow and her 
orphans surrounded by a small group of neigh- 
bors who could only express their sympathy for 
the homeless, without possessing the power to 
relieve them. 

"During that and the next two days the entire 
holdings in the lands mentioned above were vis- 
ited, and it was not until an advanced hour on 
Wednesday the evictions were finished. In all 
the evictions the distress of the poor people was 
equal to that depicted in the first case. Dearly 
did they cling to their homes till the last moment, 
and while the male portion bestirred themselves 
in clearing the houses of what scanty furniture 
they contained, the women and children remained 
within till the sheriff's bailiff warned them out, 
and even then it was with difficulty they could 
tear themselves away from the scenes of happier 
days. In many cases they bade an affectionate 
adieu to their former peaceable, but now desolate, 
homes. One old man, near the four score years 
and ten, on leaving his house for the last time, 
reverently kissed the doorposts, with all the im- 
passioned tenderness of an emigrant leaving his 
native land. His wife and children followed his 
example. And in agonized silence the afflicted 

i6o 



OUR ENGLISH LAND LAWS 

family stood by and watched the destruction of 
their dwelling". 

**In another case an old man, aged 90, who was 
lying ill in bed, was carried out of the house. In 
nearly every house there was someone far ad- 
vanced in age — many of them tottering to the 
grave — while the sobs of the helpless childrci 
took hold of every heart. When dispossessed 
the families grouped themselves on the ground, 
beside the ruins of their late homes, having no 
place of refuge near. The dumb animals refused 
to leave the wallsides, and in some cases were 
with difficulty rescued from the falling timbers. 

"As night set in, the scene became fearfully 
sad. Passing along the base of the mountain 
the spectators might have observed, near to 
each house, its former inmates crouching around 
a turf fire, close by a hedge; and as the drizzling 
rain poured upon them they found no cover, and 
were entirely exposed to it; but only sought to 
v/arm their famished bodies. Many of them were 
but miserably clad, and on all sides the greatest 
desolation was apparent. 1 learned afterwards 
that the great majority of them lay out all night, 
either behind the hedges or in a little wood which 
skirts the lake ; they had no other alternative. I 
believe many of them resorted to the poorhouse. 
There, these starving people remain on the cold 
bleak mountains, no one caring for them whether 

161 



IRELAND'S CASE 

they live or die. 'Tis horrible to think of, but 
more horrible to behold." 

It is wonderful to contemplate the patience of 
the wrathful God who from His Heavens gazing 
down upon such blaguardism, yet holds His 
hands from blasting with His bolts the canting 
hypocrites who are incessantly telling Him how 
they, the holiest and greatest of His people, 
glorify Him by carrying His Gospel of love and 
joy to the outer barbarians whom they take into 
their Empire to civilize and Salvationize ! 

Later some friends in Australia subscribed a 
fund, and sent for these beneficiaries of British 
law — thanks to the untiring efforts of A. M. Sul- 
livan. 

Mr. Sullivan says, "The poor people were 
sought out and collected. Some by this time had 
sitnk under their sufferings. One man named 
Bradley had lost his reason under the shock; 
other cases were equally as heartrending. There 
were old men who would keep wandering over 
the hills in view of their ruined homes, full of the 
idea that some day Adair might let them return; 
but who at last had to be borne to the workhouse 
hospital to die." 

What followed is too touchingly beautiful to 
omit — one of the most deeply touching in the 
records of nineteenth century Ireland. And the 
man, friend or enemy of our race, who can read 

162 I 



OUR ENGLISH LAND LAWS 

to the end of this chapter with heart unmoved 
and eye undimmed, is a creature to be commiser- 
ated. 

"A strange mixture of joy and sadness!" says 
Mr. Sullivan. "The survivors heard that their 
friends in Australia had paid their passage 
money. On the day they were to set out for the 
railway station, en route for Liverpool, a strange 
scene was witnessed. The calvalcade was ac- 
companied by a concourse of neighbors and 
sympathizers. They had to pass within a short 
distance of the ancient burial ground where the 
Vude forefathers of the valley slept.' They halt- 
ed, turned aside, and proceeded to the grass- 
grown cemetery. Here, in a body, they knelt, 
throwing themselves on the graves of their rela- 
tives, wnich they reverently kissed, again and 
again, and raised for the last time the Irish 
cioine, or funeral wail. Some of them pulled tufts 
of the grass, which they placed in their bosoms, 
and then resumed their way on the road to exile." 

In Derry, the port of embarkation, dinner was 
provided for them. The Presbyterian Derry 
Standard, in its report, said : 

"When dinner was concluded. Rev. Mr. 
M'Fadden, amidst the most solemn stillness, 
briefly addressed the assemblage; and it was a 
most touching sight. He spoke in the Gaelic 
tongue ; the language of their homes and firesides, 

163 



IRELAND'S CASE 

ere Adair had levelled the one, and quenched the 
other, forever. As the young priest spoke, his 
own voice full of emotion, the painful silence all 
around soon became broken by the sobs of wom- 
en, and tears flowing down many a cheek. He 
reminded them that this was the very last meal 
they would partake of on Irish soil ; that in a few 
hours they would have left Ireland forever. He 
spoke of their old homes amidst the Donegal 
hills, of the happy days passed in the now silent 
and desolate valley of Derryveigh; of the peace 
and happiness that they had known then, because 
they were contented, and were free from tempta- 
tions and angers of which the busy world was 
full. He reminded them of their simple lives — 
the Sunday Mass, so regularly attended ; the con- 
fession; the consolation of faith. Many a cheek 
was wet as he alluded to how they would be 
missed by the priest whose flock they were. But, 
most of all, their lot was sorrowful in the fact 
that, while other emigrants left behind them 
parents and relatives over whom the old roftree 
remained, they, alas ! left theirs under no shelter, 
in no home — they were wanderers and outcasts, 
with the workhouse for a last resort. But (said 
he), you are going to a better land, a free coun- 
try, where there are no tyrants, because there are 
no slaves. Friends have reached out their hands 
to you; those friends await you on the shore of 

164 



OUR ENGLISH LAND LAWS 

that better land. And here, too, in this city, 
hearts equally true and kindly have met you. Let 
your last work on Irish ground be to thank the 
good gentleman who now stands by my side, Mr. 
Alexander Sullivan. 

"And now, dear brothers, we shall be depart- 
ing. Before you take your foot off your native 
land, promise me here that you will, ab'^ e all 
things, be faithful to your God, and attend to your 
religious duties, under whatever circumstances 
you may be placed. (Sobs and cries of 'We will ! 
We will!'). Never neglect your night and morn- 
ing prayers, and never omit to approach the 
Blessed Eucharist at least at Christmas and Eas- 
ter. And, boys, don't forget poor old Ireland. 
(Cries of *Never! Never! God knows'). — Don't 
forget the old people at home, boys. Sure they 
will be counting the days till the letter comes 
from you. And they will be praying for you, and 
we will all pray God be with you." 

Ah I how these children of woe in Ireland, and 
the children of their children at the world's four 
corners, to which they were scourged by Eng- 
land, her laws and her lords, should, in their in- 
most souls, cherish and revere the sublime laws 
and benign rule of their loving protector, Britain 
the Chivalrous I 



i6s 



CHAPTER XL 
THE LAST CENTURY 

Since the Irish Parliament was purchased, 117 
years ago, and Ireland still more closely gathered 
up to the bosom of her stepmother, the history 
of the island may be written in three words — 
lAXATION, STARVATION, EMIGRATION. 

Or economically, we might make one word do 
ior it all— RUINATION. 

In the first quarter century after the Union, al- 
most all the little industries that remained in 
Ireland melted away. 

The period since has been marked by a succes- 
sion of famines, the direct result of English rule 
and ruin. The trying month of July, during 
which the preceding year's food crop was usually 
exhausted, and the current year's crop not yet 
ready, came to be known, in the Irish-speaking 
districts, as Mi na Sul Siar — that is, the Month 
of the Hollow Eyes. But tens of thousands bore 
the hollow eyes from January to January. 

Carlyle asks, "Has Ireland been governed in a 
wise and loving manner? A Government and 
guidance of white European men which has end- 
ed in perennial hunger of potatoes to every man 

166 



THE LAST CENTURY 

extant, ought to drop a veil over its face and 
walk out of court under conduct of the proper 
officers." 

The most terrible of all the half score of great 
famines which marked the last century, was that 
ol 1846-1847. At the beginning of that awful 
famine, when people were already dropping and 
dying by the wayside, the motherly Government 
stubbornly refused to close the ports and prevent 
the shipping of corn out of the country. The 
suffering of the people in those years exceeded 
the powers of description. While generous ones 
at the ends of the earth were sending their help 
to the stricken ones — even to Britain's shame, 
the Sultan of Turkey, moved to pity by the ter- 
rible happenings in Ireland, sending contribu- 
tion — British officials were busy denying that 
there was any more suffering or any more famine 
than usual — and the British Parliament was aid- 
ing a perishing people by contributing talk with 
lavish generosity. 

The famished subjects of this great British 
Government, stricken by starvation and by fam- 
ine fever, were dying so thick and fast, and leav- 
ing survivors so exhausted, that their bodies oft- 
entimes remained unburied for weeks. Then only 
the rats of the land flourished, gorging them- 
selves on the neglected dead. 

In this fruitful smiling island, sitting in the 

167 



IRELAND'S CASE 

seas contiguous to the seat of the world's great- 
est and richest Empire — and itself a part of that 
Fmpire, and taken under the Empire's special 
care — it is estimated that during those famine 
years of '46-47 almost a million died of starvation 
— died in the houses, in the fiells, on the high- 
roads, in the workhouses, on the public streets 
of the towns. 

And the vast number that died was far from 
completing Ireland's loss by that famine. 

In two other terrible ways it did dread damage 
to the Irish nation. 

In the first place, the undermining of the 
physical system of the Irish people by the con- 
stant recurrence of these famines, and especially 
the radical weakening of their system in this par- 
ticular famine, is probably the cause of the tu- 
berculosis scourge which has fastened on, and 
given the Irish nation an unenviable pre#-emin- 
ence in the history of the White Plague. 

And again, in those terrible years the people 
began flocking from the stricken land in tens and 
hundreds of thousands — to America, and to the 
ends of the earth. The little bays of Ireland 
were in those years, and for ma.ny succeeding 
years, pitifully floating out human cargoes upon 
the bosom of every tide — till tvithin five years' 
time about a million despaijfing refugees had 
fled from Ireland. 

168 



THE LAST CENTURY 

And in the famine exodus thousands and thou- 
sands carried their load of famine fever with 
them aboard the little ships or developed fam- 
ine fever on the voyage — ^and thousands upon 
thousands of them, fieehig from Ireland for the 

promised land beyond the Sea, never saw that 
land, but left their bones to whiten on the Ocean 
bed. 

And still other thousands and thousands 
reached the Promi«f ^ Land only to see it, and die. 

Along the Canadian Shore, to which their little 
ships came, the famine-stricken ones were quar- 
antined in droves, and died in heaps, and in piles 
were buried. 

I have visited a little Island at the mouth of 
the St. John River in the company of an old man, 
a doctor, who gave me a harrowing picture of 
the appearance of the unfed, unclad creatures 
w^ho were dumped there by the shipload in '46, '47 
and '48 — some of them, he said, clad in straw — 
and I saw the great furrows which mark the 
trenches in which myriads of them were buried. 

Six thousand of these poor creatures perished 
on Gros Island in the St. Lawrence. The Mon- 
treal Emigration Bureau estimated that the banks 
of the St. Lawrence, from Quebec to Port Sarnia, 
were dotted with the graves of twenty thousand 
Irish emigrants, victims of the three-thousand- 



IRELAND'S CASE 

mile-distant famine, which they foolishly thought 
they had escaped. 

Of certain ninety thousand only, of the emi- 
grants to Canada in '47, of which accurate ac- 
count was kept, it is recorded that 6,100 died on 
the voyage, 4,100 died on arrival, 5,200 died in 
hospitals, and 1,900 soon died in the towns to 
which they repaired. 

Here is a sample of the reports for a few of 
the individual ships: 

The Larch, carrying 440 passengers, had 108 
deaths. The Queen, carrying 493 passengers, had 
137 deaths. The Avon, carrying 552 passengers, 
had 236 deaths. The Virginius, carryiig 476 
passengers, had 267 deaths. 

And thus was the flower of one of the finest 
nations on the face of the earth in swaths mowed 
down. And thus in wind-rows did they wither 
from off the earth — under the aegis of British 
rule. . 

The famine specter was then aggravated by 
the emigration specter. From that time forward 
emigration from Ireland assumed alarming pro- 
portions. 

It is 1700 years since the old Roman Geogra- 
pher, Solinus, descanted upon the ideal climate 
and the fruitful soil of smiling leme, set upon the 
Western waves. lerne can still boast of ideal 
dimate and fruitful soil — yet in hundreds of thou- 
sands its children have been fleeing from it, as 

170 



THE LAST CENTURY 

from a doomed land, to earth's ends, seeking sus- 
tenance which should be plentiful at home — ^but 
tnat the British Government with the devastating 
hordes of its officials, hangers-on, landlords, 
strangling ramifications and ramificators have 
been, like leeches, sucking to the last drop the 
country's life-blood. 

Here is what an English writer who visited the 
scene in '45 was constrained to confess: "Nature 
does her duty. The land is fruitful enough. Man 
and Nature do produce abundantly. The Island 
is full and overflowing with human food. But 
something ever interposes between the hungering 
mouth and the ample banquet. The famished 
victim of a mysterious sentence spreads out his 
hands to the viands which his own industry have 
placed before his eyes; but no sooner are they 
touched than they fly. The decree of sic vos non 
nobis condemns him to toil without enjoyment. 
Social atrophy drains off the vital juices of the 
nation/' 

Experts have pronounced fruitful Ireland as 
capable of supporting in comfort a population of 
twenty million. Today less than four and a half 
millions cling to existence there. 

Seventy years ago Ireland had a population of 
almost nine million souls. At the natural rate of 
increase, the population today should be twenty 
million. Yet, through oppression, starvation, and 

^7J 



IRELAND'S CASE 

emigfration, the population, instead of being 
doubled in these seventy years, has been halved. 
That fact alone is a gauge by which to measure 
the beneticence of British rule in Ireland. 

And the poignancy of regret felt by our kind 
rulers over the depopulation they caused v^^as 
very well voiced by the London Times, when, in 
1848, writing of the wholesale emigration then 
going on, it exclaimed triumphantly: "They are 
going! the Irish are going with a vengeance! 
And a Celt will soon be as rare in Ireland as a 
Red Indian on the shores of Manhattan !'* 

And through the typically British Imperial 
Saturday Review of November 28, 1863, the voice 
of England again speaks. Referring to these 
creatures whom the brute-hearted Briton was 
scourging from the land of their forefathers, it 
howled after them, "Departing demons of assas- 
sination and murder! ... So complete is 
the rush of the departing marauders that silence 
reigns over the vast solitude of Ireland. . . . 
Just as civilization gradually supersedes the wild- 
er and fiercer creatures by man and cities, so de- 
civilization, such as is going on in Ireland, wipes 
out man to make room for oxen.*' 

When England lashes her conquered ones till 
every square inch of their bodies gives a gaping, 
quivering wound, such is the salve that is then, 
exultantly, rubbed into the agonizing wounds, by 

172 



THE LAST CENTURY 

the propagator of Christianity and pioneer of civ- 
ilization. 

Under British Rule, however, there are two 
things that flourish in Ireland. They are Public 
Debt and Taxation. The Tax-raising industry is 
the only healthy and progressive one that the 
Island knows. But, then, it is remarkably vig- 
orous. And the encouraging thing is that the 
worse the condition of the country grows the 
more merrily and the faster hum the wheels 
of the taxing machine ; and the more light-heart- 
edly the tax-master sings at his work. 

Ireland was found to be a convenient kitchen 
garden for furnishing useful, unornamerital tax- 
supplies whose raising in England's show-gar- 
den might hurt the aesthetic sense of the English- 
man. When an English lady, visiting Ireland 
in Swift's day, said to the Dean, "What a splen- 
did climate Ireland has," the Dean replied, "For 
the Lord's sake, madam, don't tell that when you 
go back to England, or they'll tax it on us !" 

Mrs. Green says : "They quartered on Irish rev- 
enues all pensioners that could not safely be pro- 
posed to a free Parliament in England — mistress- 
es of successive kings and their children ; German 
relations of the Hanovers ; useful politicians cov- 
ered by their names; a queen of Denmark ban- 
ished for misconduct; a Sardinian ambassador 
under false title. About six hundred thousand 

173 



IRELAND'S CASE 

pounds were yearly sent over to England for ab- 
sentees' pensions, annuities, and the like." 

Just watch Ireland's debt grow under the magic 
touch of a mother's hand : 

In 1795, when England was beginning her 
machinations for taking away the Jrish Parlia- 
ment, the Irish National Debt was £3,000,000. 

In 1801, when England had finally succeeded in 
stealing the Parliament from Ireland — and charg- 
ing to Ireland every bribe and every mean ex- 
pense entailed by the stealing — the Irish National 
Debt was £28,000,000 — had multiplied by nine. 

In 1817, when the Irish National Debt was 
finally merged with the British National Debt, 
the Irish debt had reached £112,000,000. It had 
been multiplied by four in the sixteen years since 
the Union. (In the same sixteen years the Brit- 
ish Debt had only increased seventy-five per 
cent.) And in the twenty-two years from the 
lime England had begun contriving for the 
Union, it had multiplied by thirty-seven! 

At the present day Ireland is privileged to 
share on equal terms in an Imperial National 
Debt — incurred for cari-ying on England's wars 
of aggression, oppression, expansion, and general 
greed — wars for the enriching of England at the 
expense of the weak in all corners of the world — 
an Imperial debt of more billions than could be 
set down in a short book like this — ^more billions 



THE 'LAST CENTURY 

than would pave every Irish highroad and every 
iiish byroad through the length and the breadth 
of ^.he land, with golden guineas. Ireland is now 
privileged to share in an Imperial National Debt 
that would purchase Ireland twenty times over 
at market prices — a staggering debt, every penny 
of whose expenditure went to the enriching of 
England, and the impoverishing of Ireland. 
So much for the debt industry in Ireland. 
Now for the taxing. 

In 1795 Ireland was taxed nine and one-half 
shillings per head of the population. 

In 1801, when the Union was finally completed, 
the taxes were fifty per cent, higher — somewhat 
less than fourteen shillings per head. In 1914 
(before the war began) the taxes were more than 
fifty-two shillings per head. 

Within 120 years the taxes had been more than 
multiplied by five. And in the 113 years since 
the Union they had been almost multiplied by 
four. 

In the present day, 1917-1918, I believe they 
are about three times what they were three years 
ago. What they will be like tomorrow — after 
the war — may be judged by those who live to 
listen to the groans of the crushed people — that 
is, if there be left in the nation enough vitality to 
emit a groan. 

Here, is another way in which to bring home 

175 



IRELAND'S CASE 

to one the crushing enormity of Ireland's terrible 
taxation : 

All income of the people over and above what 
is supposed to be a mere living pittance, is called 
the taxable income, or the taxable surplus. Now 
in complete tax revenue, beggared Ireland is pay- 
ing an amount equal to four-fifths of all her tax- 
able surplus — sixteen shillings out of every 
pound ! And at the same time wealthy England, 
possessed of an enormous taxable surplus, is pay- 
ing an amount less than one-sixth of her taxable 
surplus — less than three shillings in every pound 
of her taxable income ! 

In proportion to their respective wealths, then 
the starving Irishman's tax burden is much more 
than five times that of the fat-paunched English- 
man who rolls in his riches. 

Since the Union, England's taxation per head 
(1914) has decreased considerably. Since the 
Union, Ireland's taxation per head (1914) has in- 
creased almost four hundred per cent. 

And those are a few tax facts that will, and 
well may, astonish the million. 

In the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, 
Archbishop King, the Protestant Archbishop of 
Dublin, was so amazed at the taxing of Ireland 
into beggary, that he wrote, "I don't see how 
any more money is to be got out of these people 

176 



THE LAST CENTURY 

tinless we take away their potatoes and butter- 
milk, or slay them and sell their skins.'' 

The Archbishop offered choice of these two 
suggestions in bitter jest. But since then, the 
Iinglish rulers of Ireland have again and again lit- 
erally acted on both suggestions. 

The bitterest part of the pill is that the Irish 
people have to pay these terrible taxes for the 
purpose, chiefly, of enabling Britain to hold them 
down. A large portion of the taxes goes not only 
toward the support of the regular army and navy, 
maintained for the cowing of Ireland — but also 
for the paying of the army of police which is 
maintained for the purpose of nagging the people 
and spying on the people — and for paying the 
swarming hordes of British officials who glut 
themselves upon Ireland's vitals. Just as at the 
time of the Union England made Ireland pay the 
cost of her own robbing, today Ireland has to pay 
for the knife that cuts her own throat. 

The portion of the taxes that went for Imperial 
purposes, army, navy, etc. — was usually about 
one-third of the whole. Of the remaining two- 
thirds that came back to Ireland the droves of 
British officials, of police spies, of hangers-on, 
consumed a large part. For every twenty-nine 
shillings of England's taxes expended in England 
under the head of "cost of administration," near- 
ly twice as much — no less than fifty-two shillings 



IRELAND'S CASE 

— of Irish taxes expended i under the head of 
"cost of administration." These are the pickings 
of the British vutlures in Ireland. 

The Financial Relations Committee of 1896, 
composed chiefly of Britons appointed to investi- 
gate the financial relations between Ireland and 
England, were constrained to pronounce, "We 
believe that a large proportion of the so-called 
local expenditure in Ireland is due to Ireland's 
connection with Great Britain." (See Report of 
Financial Relations Committee). 

This same Financial Relations Committee, 
composed chiefly of Britons, had to declare, as a 
result of their investigation, that England had 
taken, in principal and interest, from Ireland, a 
sum of $1,250,000,000 over and above Irelaiid^s 
fair contribution. Mr. Childers, the head of the 
commission, advised that England should pay 
back to Ireland, in some form, $11,000,000 a year 
— by way of compensation. And when Ireland 
presented herself at the treasury and asked for 
this paltry reparation for centuries of crime and 
centuries of robbery, the genial John Bull, but 
toned up his fob and benignantly said, "To 
Hades with upcasting! Let's forgive and for- 
get." 

To contrary Ireland the benignant John gave 
two splendid choices — ''You forgive my crimes, 
and I'll forget my debts. But, if that does not 

178 



\ THE LAST CENTURY 

please you, take it the other way around — You 
forget my crimes, and I'll forgive my debts." And 
when Ireland remained stolidly irresponsive to 
such characteristic British magnanimity, John, 
pained and hurt, appealed to the world, "What 
can a godly body do with such a perverse ani- 
mal !" 

To the devil his due, however. During the last 
century England was in one way generous almost 
to extravagance. With a lavish hand, through 
the century, she dealt out to the Irish Arms Act 
after Coercion Act, and Coercion Act after Arms 
Act. With frequent and constant beneficence she, 
year after year, bestowed on them repressive 
measure after repressive measure, punitive law 
after punitive law. The Irish asked for justice 
and she gave them jail. They asked for bread — ■ 
their own bread — and she gave them bullets. 
England's own good friend, Mr. John Redmond, 
it was who reckoned up the repressive Acts of 
the Nineteenth Century, and found that in those 
oneJiundred years no less than eighty-seven Co- 
ercion Acts were bestowed by England upon Ire- 
land! 

The world, in the Nineteenth Century, would 
not stand for the fire, sword, and bloody mas- 
sacres which were handy for soothing Ireland in 
former days. So England, ever in the forefront 
of repressive progress, treated her dependency 

179 



IRELAND'S CASE 



With equally effective but more refined and up-to- 
date species of tortures. 

From the century's beginnin^gf to the century's 
ending- Ireland's continuous groaning made music 
in the ears of Britain. 



i8o 



CHAPTER XII. 
ENGLAND'S PRESENT-DAY SYSTEM 

On the last summer that I was at home in Ire- 
land — the summer before the war — I went to 
Dublin to give a lecture upon the highly sedi- 
tious subject of story-telling. Two Dublin Castle 
detectives took position facing the entrance door 
of the lecture room — with their backs against the 
railing of Parnell Square — nearly an hour before 
the time announced for the lecture. They took 
note of every conspirator who entered the hall 
for the felonious purpose of reviving Irish story- 
telling. They did not leave their post till 
the last batch of criminals left the hall, at eleven 
o'clock. And as the last party consisted of my- 
self and a few intimate Dublin friends, they then 
le^t their post only to follow us to our hiding 
places. They did not quit my trail till they had 
seen me safely in my hotel, after midnight. 

Foreign readers will probably be surprised at 
this incident. I only set it down here as a sample 
of the common incident in Ireland — of the man- 
ner in which several hundreds of people in Ire- 
land^-people whose crime is that they are striv- 
ing to uplift their country, are, and always have 

i8i 



IRELAND'S CASE 

been, dogged and shadowed from year's end to 
year's end — and complete and detailed record 
kept in Dublin Castle of every move of theirs — 
every place they went, every man th^y met, every 
person they spoke with, every house they visited 
— almost every thought they were suspected of 
thinking. This applies to all men who make 
themselves prominent even in the harmless move- 
ment of reviving the industries of Ireland, or re- 
viving the language of Ireland, or reviving any- 
thing at all that might directly or indirectly help 
Ireland. 

Whenever, on any of my constant visits home, 
I reach Ireland from America, a detective is 
awaiting me at the dock. And from that day till 
the moment that, several months later, another 
detective sees me off at the pier, I am under 
constant surveillance- — either by official detec- 
tives or by local police. Whenever, during that 
time, I quit my own little mountain village for 
either a business or a pleasure trip, for any other 
point in Ireland, the local police, having always 
at their command such sources of information as 
the railroad ticket-office, wire ahead to my point 
of destination, providing for my reception there 
— in Belfast, in Dublin, or else — by a detective 
who shadows me and keeps record of all my 
movements from my arrival in the city till I 
quit it again. 



ENGLAND'S PRESENT-DAY SYSTEM 

And this mean Middle-Ages system is prac- 
ticed upon, probably, a thousand men in Ireland 
— on most men who are guilty of the crime of 
working for Ireland's uplift. 

Of all the spy systems in the world, the old 
Russian spy system seems instinctively to come 
uppermost in people's minds and first upon their 
tongue. This is because, before England found 
it useful to ally herself with Russia, English 
cables and English writers, for English purpose, 
busied themselves in keeping the phrase "Rus- 
sian Spy" in the world's eye, and in the world's 
ear. 

The world knows it not, because English writ- 
ers and English news services see no good rea- 
son for mentioning it — but the Russian Czar in 
his palmiest days might gnash his teeth in envy 
of the English spy system in Ireland. 

Every soul (if such creatures have a soul) of 
the swarms of British officials who gorge them- 
selves upon Ireland's vitals, is supposed to do his 
part in observing and conveying "useful infor- 
mation" to Dublin Castle. Not only are there 
crowds of official detectives for use everywhere 
and on every occasion, but Ireland is bent double 
under its burden of police — every single one of 
whom is, and must be, an untiring spy. 

No other country in the world bears such an 
intolerable police burden — chiefly for spy pur- 

183 



IRELAND'S CASE 

poses — as does Ireland. There is a British po- 
liceman to every 250 men, women and children 
in Ireland. 

Every little hamlet in every remote corner of 
the mountains has got its police barracks rising 
amidst its handful of huts. And thousands of 
little villages in Ireland with population of 200 
or 300 souls (including babies) have got six and 
seven and eight police quartered upon each of 
them. It is the duty of these police to await 
every train that comes in or goes out, make note 
of all who leave the train and all who enter it — 
to watch, with the same object, every car that 
enters or leaves the village, to observe and find 
out all particulars of every stranger, riding, driv- 
ing, or afoot, in coach, carriage, or wheelbarrow, 
who visits the village, halts in it, or files through 
it. And for the upkeep of this spy-army Ireland 
is mulcted in $7,500,000 a year. 

They are responsible to their authorities for 
being able, at a moment's notice, to answer any 
question and give any information regarding any 
person, local or foreign, who ever came within 
their purview — his name, his description, his 
business, his associates, his conversation — if pos- 
sible, these creatures are expected to have worm- 
ed out the secrets of his soul. 

The British police system in Ireland is car- 
iried to still further perfection. The police must,, 

184 



ENGLAND'S PRESENT-DAY SYSTEM 

of course, be on the alert to anticipate and detect 
ell political "crime." When its detection or un- 
ravelling baffles them, that deficiency must not 
stand in their way of making an example of some 
one, innocent or guilty, for every political of- 
fence; otherMrise there would be an end of Brit- 
ish Government. So, for every "crime" com- 
mitted, someone must be made to suffer — the 
guilty by preference — but only by preference. 

Where lay witnesses are necessary to cor- 
roborate the splendid swearing of men who must 
swear hard to hold their jobs, these witnesses 
are always provided. 

When, in a political crisis, it becomes neces- 
sary to the policy of the authorities that any 
specified locality should be lawless, the police 
have to see to it that, if lawlessness cannot be 
discovered or provoked, it will be invented. And 
the patriotic policeman who creates crime for 
his superiors is not only protected, but promoted. 
If he blunders and lets the source of manufacture 
get exposed to the world he, properly, receives 
condign punishment. 

The famous Sergeant Sheridan case is as good 
an example of police manufactured crime as any 
one of a thousand others. The Sergeant had 
in his district several men, who, being guilty of 
the high crime of striving for the redress of Ire- 
land's wrongs, should be got rid of. At the same 

i8s 



IRELAND'S CASE 

time, because the whole district was active for 
Ireland, it was desirable that it should be proved 
to be a criminal district in order that the authori- 
ties would have an excuse for coercing and ter- 
rorizing it — and for punishing the more patriotic. 

But, unfortunately, the Irish workers in the 
district, in their perversity, worked within the 
law. Something had to be done then. 

The Sergeant, true to the police instinct, saw 
it was his duty to do that something — either saw 
it of his own well-trained accord, or was made to 
see it by the authorities. 

Now, in England, because it constitutes an 
effective, as well as a noble text, from which 
to preach against the barbarous Irish, one of 
the most welcome pieces of Irish news is the 
news of the malicious maiming of dumb ani- 
mals. This news always assures a shiver of 
holy horror, shaking the shocked souls of pious 
English people who feel cheered at reports of 
the maiming or killing of an Irish agitator or 
an Indian agitator, the blowing of Sepoys from 
a cannon's mouth, or at the butchering of 
wounded Soudanese after a battle. So the good 
Sergeant, knowing his market and his mar- 
keteers, devised a splendid conspiracy for mut- 
ilating dumb animals in his district. It was, for 
a time, highly effective, proving a safe and con- 
venient way for swearing away the liberties of 

i86 



ENGLAND'S PRESENT-DAY SYSTEM 

''objectionable" persons in the district. But 
through an unfortunate accident the Sergeant 
let himself be discovered. Quietly and quickly 
the Government slipped him out of the district, 
gave him one hundred pounds, shipped him to 
America, and let the little affair blow over. 

This is only quoted as a sample of the spirit 
that permeates the whole English method of gov- 
erning Ireland. The same spirit goes through 
every branch and stem of every department of 
the terrible English system in the country. And 
all the official crimes are locked and interlocked. 
The judiciary is packed with reliable, picked 
men for doing England's work — men who have 
been tested and proved satisfactory in subor- 
dinate places before being entrusted with their 
high positions. 

The same packing system applies to the juries 
in the courts. In any political case where it is 
desirable to convict and sentence a man who has 
become objectionable by reason of his too ar- 
dent work for Ireland, trial by jury is supposed 
to be accorded him. But the British officials 
take care to select such a jury that the man will 
not have a chance in twenty of a fair verdict. 
From the jury panel the Crown Prosecutor care- 
fully selects the trusty men for trying the case — 
and in court goes through the form of getting a 
jury, causing to stand aside every man on all 

187 



IRELAND'S CASE 

the jury roll who is Irish and National, every 
man who has Irish or National leanings, and 
every man, even of the British garrison in Ire- 
land, who might be in danger of putting con- 
science before prejudice, when deciding whether 
or not the victim should be deprived of his lib- 
erty or of his life. 

Of his life, I say, because, during the crisis 
of the Land League agitation in Ireland, when 
crimes were committed and it was necessary to 
make an example, there were several undisputed 
cases of men having been hung for crimes with 
which they had no connection. 

If a guilty man was to be transported or hung 
the jury packing system was handy and effective. 
If an innocent man was to be transported or 
hung the jury packing system was more valu- 
able still. A Crown Prosecutor's value was often 
rated by the perfection of his jury packing abili- 
ties. The notorious prosecutor, Peter O'Brien, 
whose perfected abilities in this matter earned 
for him his national nickname of Peter the Pack- 
er, proved himself of such especial value to the 
British Government that he was raised to the 
Bench, and pushed upward till the fellow ac- 
tually sat as Lord Chief Justice for Ireland! 
This fellow only ceased to disgrace the Bench 
when he died off it, a few years ago. 

The system is thorough. The manufacture of 

i88 



ENGLAND'S PRESENT-DAY SYSTEM 

a crime is backed by the subornation of perjury, 
which, in turn, is backed by hand-picking the 
jury; and that in turn strengthened by Bench- 
packing. This Bench-packing, by the way, was 
ludicrously illustrated at a famous Irish State 
trial of the nineteenth century, when the pre- 
siding Judge, alluding to the counsel for the de- 
fendant, let slip his mind with the phrase, "The 
gentleman on the other side." 

So intimate, almost certain, is the connection 
in Ireland between law and the most terrible 
injustice, that the Irishman, at length, has come 
instinctively to range himself on the side of the 
accused. 

That the Habeas Corpus is suspended in Ire- 
land whenever the Government chooses, and men 
thrown into jail without charge, and kept there 
without trial, astonishes incredulous foreigi^ers. 

Under Chief Secretary Foster there were seven 
hundred "suspects" enjoying jail terms at one 
time — without one of them ever having been 
faced with a charge, or confronted by an accuser. 
Probably several thousand such suffered jail in 
the same way, during Buckshot Foster's regime. 

Then, when a man became troublesome by do- 
ing too effective work for the amending or tne 
miserable land laws, it was only necessary for 
the landlord, or the British authorities, to pro- 
cure two men — they might be the landlord's own 

189 



IRELAND'S CASE 

bailiffs or officials of the Government— to go be^ 
fore one of the British magistrates, and swear 
that they had good reason to suspect this man 
was dangerous to the peace of the realm. Neither 
examination nor cross-examination was neces- 
sary. No details were asked or required. The 
accused was not only not there, but in no case 
did he know of the secret proceedings against 
him. Just the simple oath of men to whom oaths 
were a joke — their formal oath, given and taken 
without question and in secret — sufficed to de- 
prive the best and most reputable men in the 
land — alike lay and cleric — of their liberty. The 
first intimation given the accused of his "trial" 
and "conviction" was the descent upon his house 
oftentimes in the dead of night, of an armed 
troop of police, who carried him off without 
charge, and lodged him in a jail cell, among 
drunks and thieves, where he should remain till 
such time as it pleased the Government to re- 
lease him. 

That this method of arresting a man without 
accusation and jailing him without trial is still 
a valuable adjunct of the English Government in 
Ireland, and likely to continue so, is proved by 
the fact that the authorities have been using it 
effectively against workers in the Irish Vol- 
unteers and Sinn Fein during the past few years. 

And the treatment of arrested political pris- 

190 



ENGLAND'S PRESENT-DAY SYSTEM 

oners by the British authorities is usually viler 
than anything that occurs in semi-barbarous na- 
tions. 

Even as I write this chapter I pick up an Irish 
Unionist newspaper, "The Belfast Daily Tele- 
graph," of current date (May 28, 1917), giving 
account of the trial of an Irish Nationalist, a 
school teacher, James Joseph Layng, court-mar- 
tialed in Dundalk for the crime ot being found 
in possession of a rebel revolver — from which 
account I wish to quote for the benefit of the 
readers, the following cross-examination of Po- 
lice Sergeant Graham : 

"ATTORNEY— You brought the prisoner to 
the barracks at Castlebellingham and put him in- 
to the lock-up there? 

"SERGEANT— Yes. 

"ATTORNEY— Am I right in saying that that 
room is nine feet by three feet six inches? 

SERGEANT — I cannot say that you are far 
astray, but it is more than three fe-et six inches. 

"ATTORNEY— It has a stone floor, without 
any windows? 

"SERGEANT— There is a small open slit. 

"ATTORNEY— Isn't it devoid of any comfort? 

'^SERGEANT — There is a big wooden plank 
in it. 

"ATTORNEY — ^There are no sanitary conven- 
iences? 

191 



IRELAND'S CASE 

•'SERGEANT— None. 

''ATTORNEY— Was the accused put in that 
night? 

"SERGEANT— He was. 

"ATTORNEY— And kept there for five days 
and five nights? 

"SERGEANT— Yes. 

"ATTORNEY— During that time was he eve* 
taken out for any exercise? 

"SERGEANT— No. 

"ATTORNEY— Was there any bed there? 

"SERGEANT— No." 

And that is but a sample of the brutal savagery 
with which Irish political prisoners are and al- 
ways have been treated, by the first, greatest, and 
most glorious empire on earth ! 

O'Donovan Rossa, when in English prisons, 
serving his life sentence, and protesting against 
the indignities to which he and his fellows were 
subject, frequently had his hands chained behind 
his back for days together, in solitary confine- 
ment. And to eat the bits of food that were 
thrust to him through the bars, he had to go on 
his knees and lap it up like a wild beast! 

Michael Davitt, the one-armed, tells how he 
and his fellow political prisoners in English dun- 
geons, in order to get a mouthful of the fresh air 
for which they gasped, had oftentimes, to lie on 
their stomachs on the floor of their cell and put 

192 



ENGLAND'S PRESENT-DAY SYSTEM 

their mouth to the slit at the bottom of the door. 
And on passings a garbage barrel when the keep- 
er was fortunately not watching them, the prison- 
ers grabbed from it the dirty ends of tallow 
candles, and secreted the tid-bits, which at the 
first opportunity they ravenously devoured. 

The treatment of Irish political prisoners in 
English dungeons has been universally so brutal, 
so savagely unhuman, so much worse than any- 
thing the world is aware of, that it is no wonder 
these Irishmen emerge from the English dun- 
geons — whenever they do emerge, incurably in 
Aalided, crippled, blind, and insane. For some, 
the jail door opened to the tomb. For others, 
far worse, it opened to the madhouse. 

On the eve of this chapter's going to press 
comes the news of the doing to death of 
Thomas Ashe by Britain's usual prison practices, 
it is a sadly fitting climax for this chapter. 

This noble fellow, a teacher, a Gaelic League 
enthusiast, and a beloved leader of his people, 
was thrown into prison for the crime of wearing 
an Irish Volunteer uniform. He w^as a political 
prisoner — but Britain branded him criminal, and 
ordered him to be treated with all the prison in- 
dignities meted out to the lowest criminal. Ashe 
refused to observe the rules for criminals, and he 
refused to take food. He was confined to his 

193 



IRELAND'S CASE 

cell. His bed clothes were taken from him, his 
bed was taken from him, the little jail seat was 
taken from him, his own clothes and shoes were 
taken from him. For days he was left in that 
condition in his little, dirty, cold, cell — without 
a seat to sit on, without a bed to lie on, without 
clothes to preserve to him the vital heat. And 
meanwhile he was being forcibly fed. When at 
length they found that their work was accom- 
plished, that his heart was giving out, and that 
he must die within some hours, they had the 
dying man carried and carted from his cell, and 
from the jail, and flung into an outside hos- 
pital — where, in a few hours, he expired^ — only 
one other Irishman done away with, to England's 
glorification. 

This crime — which may well seem unbelievable 
to some readers — was not committed in Belgium 
— nor in the South Sea Islands. But in the heart 
of the Empire most renowned on earth. 



194 



CHAPTER XIII. 
HAS THE LEOPARD CHANGED HIS SPOTS? 

But England has got a change of heart in recent 
years, say some people. These people are strang- 
ers. And these strangers who give us pleasant 
news of England in Ireland describe England's 
change of heart under four various headings. 

First — England is, today, generously giving 
Ireland ameliorative legislation. 

Second — She has been lavishing large sums of 
money on ireiand durmg recent decades — pur- 
chasing the land for the people, building laborers 
cottages, etc. 

Third — She is yielding more freedom and jus- 
tice to Ireland. 

Fourth — She is exercising her rule over the two 
peoples in Ireland, the Anglo-Irish and the Irish- 
Irish, with much more impartiality than she did. 

Let us seek for proof of the four allegations : 

THE FIRST A generous money prize can 

safely be offered the man who will discover one 
instance of England's having voluntarily granted 
to Ireland relief from any oppression — voluntarily 
bringing forward and passing even one remedial 
measure for Ireland — in the 117 years since the 

195 



IRELAND'S CASE 

Irish Parliament united with the English Parlia- 
ment. 

During that period Ireland has at various 
times, won various ameliorative measures — in 
every case won these measures by force. Every 
one who has even a nodding acquaintance with 
Irish history during the past 117 years, knows 
that in all of that time never once — even once— 
did England look around and say, Here is a 
gross wrong perpetrated upon Ireland — Let U8 
remedy it. 

Every single remedial measure of the 117 
years — from A. D. 1800 to A. D. 1917, was wrung 
from England only after the whole Irish nation 
had for years, and for decades — and sometimes for 
generations — struggled and fought for that meas- 
ure, and compelled it. England, far from gener- 
ously granting such measure, had a hundred 
times vowed through her ministers that she 
never would consent to grant it. She had filled 
the jails, and crowded the gibbets, with the fight- 
ers for the measure, in vain efforts to allay the 
storm and withhold the reform. For every "con- 
cession" won, our best people had to rot in jail, 
be shot down on the streets, hang from the gib- 
bets — before generous England, harried and har- 
assed, and her rule in Ireland nullified, had at 
length to swallow her vows and yield a little to 
save the rest, 

196 



HAS THE LEOPARD CHANGED HIS SPOTS? 

This applies to every single "generous" grant, 
from first to last, that "generous" England 
in change of heart has *bestowed" upon Ireland 
—from the Act of Catholic Emancipation in '29 
to the Land Acts of recent years. Every "gen- 
erous" grant was dragged from England by su- 
perhuman force — was given by England with as 
much hearty good-will as would grace the giv- 
ing of her eye-teeth. For instance : 

(a) With holy wrath and burning indigna- 
tion the idea of emancipating and giving rights of 
citizenship to Irish Roman Catholics in Ireland 
was at first spurned by British Ministers. As 
late as 1827, when the agitation for their rights 
had long been raging, Sir Robert Peel still as- 
serted, "I cannot consent to widen the door of 
political power to Roman Catholics. I cannot 
consent to give them civil rights and privileges 
equal to those possessed by their Protestant fel- 
low countrymen." The Irish people answered 
Peel with still more fearful agitation — giving him 
"change of heart." In February, 1829, he said, 
"In the course of the last six months, England, at 
peace with the world, has had five-sixths of her 
infantry force occupied in maintaining peace, and 
in doing police duties in Ireland. I consider 
such a state of things much worse than rebel- 
lion." In that year, when things in Ireland got 
worse than rebellion, the Emancipation Act, so 

197 



IRELAND'S CASE 

long spurned, was passed, and generous England, 
getting sudden change of heart, generously per- 
mitted Irishmen to have some of the rights of 
citizens ! 

(b) The next relief of any importance that 

Ireland got was the Act of Church Disestablish- 
ment, passed by Gladstone in 1869. The Anglican 
Protestant Church was the Established Church in 
Ireland which Catholic Ireland had to support 
by tithes. In thousands of districts where the 
only Anglicans were the imported minister, his 
wife and children and the imported sexton, the 
minister drew from Catholics, many of whom 
were themselves perishing with hunger, a fat 
salary which kept him in luxury's lap. Often- 
times, too, the man who benefitted from a parish 
did not live in the parish — lived maybe on an- 
other fat living in England, and paid a salary to 
some poor substitute devil, who went through 
the form of conducting services for nobody on 
Sunday morning — or, like Swift, preaching his 
sermon to "My dearly beloved Roger" — his horse- 
boy — and drawing the large salary for his em- 
ployer. When, after terribly long and terribly 
fierce agitation, Gladstone at length disestab- 
lished the English Church in Ireland, he, in his 
place in Parliament, confessed : "If it had not 
been for the Fenian movement in Ireland I never 



HAS THE LEOPARD CHANGED HIS SPOTS? 

would have brought in the Disestablishment 
Act." 

(c) The Land Acts of a still later period, 
when the land agitation was rocking the king- 
doms, were passed for exactly the same forceful 
reason — after the idea had time and time again 
been scorned and spurned by all England and 
its Ministers, and after time and time again they 
had practically vowed that ' they would rather 
clear all the Irish out of Ireland than grant such 
measures. When the first and most important 
of these land acts was passed by Gladstone (in 
'8i), after he had vainly tried to cow Ireland by 
a reign of terror, Lord Derby, in the course of 
an article in The Nineteenth Century, comment- 
ing upon Gladstone's confession that he had dis- 
established the Church only out of fear, wrote: 
*'That was the exact and naked truth. But it is 
regrettable that for the third time in less than a 
century agitation accompanied by violence should 
have been shov/n to be the most effective instru- 
ment for righting whatever Irishmen may be 
pleased to consider their wrongs." 

(d) The Full Measure of Home Rule, so long 
and so solemnly promised Ireland — and which 
proved indeed to be a Fool Measure of Home 
Rule, one of the latest, most comic proofs of Eng- 
land's change of heart, need not be dilated on 
here. It belongs in a joke book. 



IRELAND'S CASE 

Yes, England gets a change of heart, and gen- 
erously gives to Ireland more generous laws, 
every time, and only every time, that the strug- 
gle within Ireland is strong enough to compel 
her — every time, and only every time, that it 
becomes imperative on her to sacrifice a little in 
order to save the remainder. 

THE SECOND — In the last quarter century 
England has been bestowing large sums of 
money on Ireland with a lavish hand — so many 
hundreds of thousands of pounds for building 
laborers* cottages — so many millions of pounds 
for buying out the landlords, and presenting the 
land to the people — and so many billions 
for so many other charitable objects — in vain 
hope of appeasing the Irish beggars. 

It was Mr. Redmond and his Parliamentary 
party that, for their own small glorification, glad- 
ly led the world to believe that the generous Eng- 
lishman in a sudden spasm of munificence had 
begun showering his gold upon the pitiable Irish 
beggar. 

But what is the reality: 

The District Councils throughout Ireland 
were granted permission to pre-empt from their 
own members and from their electors, portions of 
land for the farm laborers — and given permis- 
sion to borrow, at a reasonable rate of interest, 
from the common purse — the Imperial purse — 

200 



HAS THE LEOPARD CHANGED HIS SPOTS? 

the moneys necessary for building cottages for 
these laborers — to borrow and pay back the prin- 
cipal plus the interest, on the instalment plan. 
Which was neither a gain nor a loss, to the Im- 
perial purse. 

The farmers were likewise given permission to 
borrow from the common purse — the purse into 
which Ireland was paying a far higher proportion 
of her wealth than was England — to borrow at a 
rate of interest which secured the Imperial ex- 
chequer against any loss on the transaction — 
enough to buy from the landlords at an exorbii 
ant valuation, the lands that were really theii 
own, and that had been the possessions of their 
family from time immemorial. 

And please observe, in this connection, that the 
Irish money in the Imperial Savings Banks was 
lent to the Government at two and one-half per 
cent — while the Imperial Government was gen- 
erously lending back to these investors the mon- 
eys for purchase of their lands, at three and one- 
quarter per cent. The English and Anglo-Irish 
landlords of the Irish estates were the people 
most directly benefitted by England's won- 
drous generosity. 

And these ordinary and safe business transac- 
tions furnish the sole foundation for the English- 
gentleman-and-Irish-bees"ar legend, which a mil- 
lion innocent people outside of Ireland so greed- 

20I 



IRELAND'S CASE 

ily committed to memory, from the continuous 
reiteration of Mr. Redmond's Parliamentary Far- 
rots! 

THE THIRD— And now let us examine 
how she has extended freedom and justice in Ire- 
land. 

(a) Mr. Arthur Balfour, who visited America 
recently — as a champion of Democracy and Lib- 
erty ! — said, apparently without wincing, that 
England and America could not stand by and 
see "one unscrupulous power deprive mankind 
ot its liberties !" 

Now this dazzling democrat was Chief Secre- 
tary for Ireland, and, like the other Chief Secre- 
taries, of course, suppressed the right of public 
meeting and the right of free speech, whenever 
and wherever he chose. There is nothing spe- 
cially worth noting in such performance of any 
Englishman — in Ireland. But his most notable 
achievement in the cause of liberty to which I 
wish to draw attention here, was when, after 
proclaiming a public meeting in Mitchellstown, 
County Cork, and sending his armed forces there 
to back his proclamation, he, to prevent any crim- 
inal leniency in the forcing of English liberty 
upon Irish barbarians, telegraphed to the Com- 
mandant of the forces, on the morning of the 
proscribed meeting, his famous telegram (in 
cipher), "Do not hesitate to shoot." 

202 



HAS THE LEOPARD CHANGED HIS SPOTS? 

In compliance with the order of this champion 
of world freedom, British bullets were that day 
shot into the limbs and bowels and heads and 
iiearts of men who mistakenly thought that to 
\oice their grievances they could insist upon 
liberty of meeting and liberty of speaking, in 
their own land. And crosses in the little grave- 
yard at Mitchellstown, to this day, attest not only 
Mr. Balfour's consuming passion for mankind's 
liberties, but also England's generous change of 
heart, toward the land "that is dependent on and 
protected by England." 

(b) Until the privilege was forced from Eng- 
land by a big struggle a few years ago, Irish his- 
tory dare not be taught to Irish pupils in Irish 
National Schools. Now Irish pupils are gracious- 
ly permitted to learn just as much hand-picked 
Irish history as may be contained in a text-book 
approved of by the appointees of the English 
Government 1 

(c) It is a crime in Ireland, punishable by 
fine or imprisonment, and for which men have 
frequently been fined and imprisoned, to reply 
in Irish to the inquiries of a policeman. Only 
the other day even, an Oxford student, named 
Chevasse, an enthusiast for the Irish langfuage, 
was imprisoned for this revolting crime. And 
it is a crime, punishable by fine or imprisonment, 
and for which men have frequently been fined 

203 



IRELAND'S CASE 

and imprisoned, for an Irishman to print his 
name upon his cart in the Irish language, in- 
stead of the English language. 

During the recent Land League agitation in 
Ireland "intimidation" of any Government pet 
was exalted among the crimes on the Statute 
book. A man was imprisoned for instance for 
the crime (as literally sworn to) of intimidating 
a boycotted man by "winking at his pig" as he 
passed the grunter gentleman in the market- 
place. And a man was imprisoned for smiling, 
"a humbugging kind of smile/' as he passed an- 
other anti-Irish Irishman. Those are literal ex- 
amples of Irish "crimes" for which scores of 
Irishmen have been fined and imprisoned. 

(d) In 191 5, 1916 and 1917, young men, work- 
ers in the Irish Volunteers were again and again 
being arrested without charge, and imprisoned 
without trial. In the same years young men, 
workers in the Volunteers, were being taken 
from their homes and from their employment, 
and, without charge preferred, deported to Eng- 
land — and without any provision being made for 
them, left to live or die in hostile rural English 
villages, where the "Irish traitors" were taunted 
and jeered, and made the constant objects of 
contumely by the liberty-loving Briton. 

(e) In 1914, after the Orange Volunteers of 
the North had imported all the arms they wanted, 

204 



HAS THE LEOPARD CttANdE£> HIS SPOTS?, 

and transmitted them without molestation to 
e-rery corner of the Province, the Irish Volun- 
teers in Dublin imported a ship-load of arms 
which they landed at Howth. On receipt of this 
news at Dublin Castle a regiment of soldiers was 
immediately marched out to take the arms from 
these men. The soldiers failed in their task, re- 
turned into Dublin downcast, and were marching 
along- Bachelor's Walk to their barracks, when a 
number of boys, women and children, emerging 
from back streets, jeered them and threw at them 
some sticks and stones. Suddenly, at the word 
of command, a company of the soldiers wheeled, 
knelt on one knee on the street, and poured two 
volleys into a dense throng — leaving forty- 
eight people of both sexes lying in their blood,, 
four or five of them never to rise again! 

As is usual in Ireland, not the slightest pun- 
ishment was meted out to anyone of the mur- 
derers, officers or soldiers. 

(f) In 1916, during the Insurrection in Dub- 
lin, one of the officers in command, Captain Colt- 
hurst, a typical British Junker, arrested three 
men, Skeffington, Maclntyre, and Dickson, who 
had no connection with the Rising — and, without 
confronting them with any charge, without court- 
martial or hearing of any kind, had these men 
taken into the barrack yard and shot dead. 
SkefQngton had witnessed the shooting dead of % 

905 



IRELAND'S CASE 

toy of sixteen years, named Coady, Who bad 
given Colthurst a dis-respectful reply. To com- 
pel England to grant even an inquiry into these 
murders, Heaven and earth had to be move4 sfter 
the insurrection was over. A form oi inquiry 
was gone through, the brute conveniently ad- 
judged "insane" and ordered to be confined dur- 
ing his Majesty's pleasure! 

(g) In the same insurrection the English sol- 
diers, exasperated that Irishmen should have the 
presumption to fight for their country, and un- 
able to oust the fighters who held their quarters 
so gallantly — visited several houses in non-fight- 
ing districts, chiefly in King Street, and there 
shot to death an unknown number of people, es- 
timated at forty, who were guilty of no crime 
and against whom there was no charge — and 
buried them in the cellars — from which their 
bodies were being dug up during the week suc- 
ceeding the insurrection. Heaven and earth and 
the British Parliament were moved by Mr. Gin- 
nell, M. P., to get an inquiry into this barbarous 
massacre. But even an inquiry was stubbornly 
refused — by that Empire which is the champion 
of all small nations that have fallen under the 
rule of her trade rival. 

(h) A little matter of parellels here, will bet^ 
ter bring out England's change of heart toward 
Ireland: 

206 



HAS THE LEOPARD CHANGED HIS SPOTS? 

\ . 

The Boer "barbarians" some years ago took 
prisoner the Jameson raid criminals. 

Tht "civilized" Britons, one year ago, took 
prisoner a band of Irish patriots. 

The Britishers, hired by British capitalists, 
and backed by English statesmen (who wanted 
the diamond mines of Boer-land) attempted to 
seize and steal the government and the liberties 
of the foreign Republic whose hospitality they 
were enjoying, and whose opportunities were en- 
riching them. 

The Irish patriots, fired by their country's 
wrongs, and backed by all that was noble of their 
race, arose up in their country, in brave attempt 
to wrest their own country from the robber who 
held it — and return it to its rightful owners to 
rule. 

Britain the honorable, which had hired its ras- 
cals to do their vile crime, then begged for the 
rascals' lives; and by the barbarous Boers the 
lives were spared — of both leaders and men. 

Britain the liberty-loving, backed up against 
the nearest wall the sixteen leaders of the Irish 
patriots and shot them dead. 

(i) James Connolly, Commandant of the Irish 
rebels, a noble character and brave man, was 

fi07 



IRELAND'S CASE 

seriously wounded in the Dublin fighting. The 
doctors disagreed as to whether the wound was 
vital or not. England, however, was not making 
any chances. In his bed he was court-mai'tialled, 
and sentenced to death for the unforgivaole crime 
of fighting for the freedom of a smiU nation 
under other heel than Germany's. And as, of 
course, he was unable to walk, England's un- 
daunted soldiers carried him to the place of ex- 
ecution, and there propped up the hopeless crim- 
inal — while her firing squad sent their bullets 
through his heart. 

So far have freedom and justice been extended 
in Ireland in recent years. 

And FOURTH: 

We learn that England, too, is dealing impar- 
tially with both peoples in Ireland — the people of 
British blood and sym.pathy who are the British 
garrison in Ireland — and the people of Irish 
blood, the Irish Nationalists. Let us see. 

Sir Edward Carson, a few years ago, threat- 
ened to lead a rebellion of the British in Ireland 
— the Orangemen — against the British Govern- 
ment if it dared to give Ireland even a miser- 
able shadow of Home Rule. He publicly an- 
nounced that he would get the aid of Germany's 
Kaiser, that he would ally himself and his fol- 
lowers with the German Empire, and get the 

208 



HAS THE LEOPARD CHANGED HIS SPOTS? 

Geijnans to fight his battle. Sir Edward Carson 
went to Germany, had interviews with the high- 
est ofScials there, lunched with the Kaiser, and 
had a German military man — a German spy — 
brought into Ulster, to study the situation and 
the ground. Sir Edward Carson, because he did 
this only for the laudable purpose of holding Ire- 
land down, was soon after elevated to the Eng- 
lish Cabinet, an idol of the English people. So 
far. so good. 

Next, Roger Casement, an Irish Nationalist 
and idealist, working to uplift and free Ireland, 
did almost exactly the same things as Sir Ed- 
ward Carson — except that he did not introduce 
any German spy into Ireland. 

On a certain morning when the anti-Irish Car- 
stm, idolized by England, and we'ghted with hon- 
ors and responsibility, was seated in the British 
Cabinet, the noble Casement was swinging from 
a gallows tree ! 

_ In this connection we shall pause to note an il- 
luminative incident reported in the newspapers 
on the day of -Roger Casement's hanging. The 
news report said, "When the black flag was 
hoisted, signal that the law had taken its course, 
and justice been vindicated, there went up from 
the multitude" (of change-of-heart Britons) 
which surged in front of the jail, a great howl 

209 



IRELAND'S CASE 

of ming-led execration of the traitor and jiibiladon 
for his ending. At the back of the jail walls a 
little group of Irishmen and women were knelt 
in prayer." 

In that little picture is presented seven cen- 
turies of the history of England in Ireland. In 
the jailyard Erin hanging from the gallows 
tree, while the British mob (better spelt Brut- 
ish) inspired by the devil, dance, curse, and howl 
for joy — the while at the back of the jail Erin's 
children kneel with their sorrows and their God. 

Has England got a change of heart toward Ire- 
land? 

Four centuries ago killing the natives of Ire- 
land was a field-sport for the gentlemen of Eng- 
land. 

Three centuries ago "Because the Queen's 
troopers could not kill Irishmen fast enough, no 
Irishman was pardoned unless he undertook to 
murder his friend or relative" (Wni. Parnell), 
And Lord Mountjoy's Secretary relates that 
"Lord Mount joy never received any rebel to 
mercy but such as had drawn blood on their fel- 
low rebels." 

Nearly a century and a half ago, Hussey 
Burgh, in the Anglo-Irish House of Commons, 
protested "The words Crime, Punishment and 
Ireland are in England's eyes synonymous. They 

2IO 



HAS THE LEOPARD CHANGED HIS SPOTS? 

are marked in blood on the margin of her Sta- 
tutes The destructive influence of the laws 
have borne Ireland down to a state of Egyptian 
bondage/' 

Today Mrs. Gren testifies *'The evils of the 
English conquest ^ve never for a moment sub- 
sided ; and l^ey are at the present day almost as 
tl-fe as they were seven hundred years ago." 

Has the leopard indeed changed his spots? 



31 S 



CHAPTER XIV. 
THE SUMMING UP 

I have tried to picture of the ways of England 
with Ireland — of England's methods in first rop- 
ing, and then ruling, another race. Though the 
picture be only roughly sketched, it is yet suf- 
ficient to show by what unparalleled barbarism 
she imposed her rule upon Ireland, and by what 
fearful injustice she has since tried to maintain it. 

If England had discovered Ireland, an uninhab- 
ited Island, and colonized it with her own people, 
and in ruling even her own people had meted out 
to them a tithe of the horrors which she has dealt 
to the Irish people — inflicted upon them a hun- 
dreth of the atrocities which she has perpetrated 
upon the Irish race — all humanity would cry out 
that her own people must cast off the rule of their 
unnatural mother — that England had for all time 
forfeited all right to rule her own colony, of her 
own offspring. 

For merely trying to levy unjust taxation upon 
her own kin (as well as the other races) in her 
own American Colonies, even that portion of her 
Colony population which was Anglo-Saxon, rose 
up in its wrath and shook off the yoke of the 
mother, 

212 



THE SUMMING UP 

In Ireland's case the argument against Eng- 
land's continued rule is multiplied a thousand 
fold. 

Since, through lust of power, England sent her 
devastating army into an ancient land to conquer 
on ancient race possessed of a higher civilization 
than her own — ravished this race, murdered, 
plundered, abased, and degraded, and wrought 
on them inhumanities beyond the gift of pen or 
tongue to describe — in this land, put out a light 
that had lighted the world's path ; and through 
fearful centuries of fearful night kept savagely 
stamping out the seeds of the fire, which, having 
once given its light to the world, was ever in im- 
minent danger of doing so again — and from the 
day of conquest down to the present day, imposed 
upon this people "laws" that have always been 
synonymous with injustice the rankest, and op- 
pression the most terrible — a thousand times 
stronger, then, is this people's claim for the free- 
dom which is the ordinary due of all peoples oc- 
cupying the land of their forefathers. 

It is for this freedom — which all men who are 
MEN must claim — that the Irish people have, 
against overwhelming odds, fought an astound- 
ing fight, lasting through seven centuries — a fisfht 
that has never slackened — and never will slacken 
till the end is won. 

The winning of mere Home Rule, even if h 

213 



IRELAND'S CASE 

were real Home Rule, instead of the mockery that 
was lately played with under the nick-name of 
Home Rule, would, of course, be considered by 
the Irish people only as a milestone on the way 
to their goal. 

But it has been suggested by American people, 
who thereby consider themselves liberal, that the 
Irish question should be settled by giving to Ire- 
land Colonial Home Rule — the same rule that is 
enjoyed by Canada and Australia. 

It should be pointed out to these liberal Amer- 
icans that, in the first place, their American fore- 
fathers, many of them, sprung from the loins of 
England, would not have been content to accept 
from their mother, England, that Colonial Home 
Rule which they now think should satisfy a dis- 
tinct race inhabiting a distinct country. 

Next, Canada and Australia, enjoying Colonial 
Home Rule, are countries colonized by England 
and inhabited by England's own children. In 
accepting Colonial Home Rule they only unite 
in bonds of afiPection with their motherland and 
mother race. 

And in the third place, the motherland of Can- 
ada and Australia is not now, and has not been 
through centuries past, striving to starve their 
bodies, and crush their spirits, and kill their souls 
—has not for centuries been plundering and mur- 

214 



THfi SUMMING UP 

dering them, and devastating their land. If such 
had been the case, Australia and Canada, far 
from being content with Colonial Home Rule, 
would long since have rebelled against their own 
mother and thrown her off. 

In Ireland we have an ancient race, as distinct 
from the English race as is the French from the 
German, the Scandinavian from the Turk. This 
distinct and ancient race inhabits a distinct and 
separate country. To this race experience has 
discovered no reason for drawing near to, but a 
thousand fearful reasons for pushing away from, 
those "conquerors" who are still striving to hold 
them by the same brute force by which they first 
captured them. And physically, morally and 
spiritually, this struggling race is certainly not 
inferior to the average races of earth that now 
do hold their freedom — and more certainly not 
inferior to the race which regards itself as com- 
missioned by God to dominate its neighbors. 

For it is well always to keep in mind that Ire- 
land's fight is, not merely against foreign misrule, 
but against FOREIGN RULE. 

And in the Irishmen's stating and proving of 
Ireland's clams, whole tomes of argument and 
reams of reasoning may be given to the world 
in four words— WE WANT OUR COUNTRY. 

Many foreigners, deeply sympathetic toward 

ai5 



IRELAND'S CASE 

Ireland, and desirous of Ireland's prosperity, pro- 
test upbraidingly, **Why not forget the past, and 
join in a true partnership with England — for Ire- 
land's best benefit?" 

To this protest there are three rather effective 
replies. 

In the first place, if England, with her grasp 
still upon the throat of prostrate Ireland, and her 
heel sunk into Ireland's bowels, made the propo- 

vsition. "Join me on equal terms or be d- to 

you" — prostrate Ireland, being possessed of some 
trace of spirit, could not accept such highway- 
man invitation. It is only after England has let 
go her hold on Ireland's throat, and that Ireland, 
risen to her feet and standing erect, looks Eng- 
land fearlessly in the face, that she can with 
credit say whether or not she wishes such part- 
nership. The most cursory examination of the 
character of the inviting partner (as displayed in 
the previous chapters) will show the reader what 
would be Ireland's prompt decision. 

In the second place, the English race and the 
Irish race are as dissimilar as the plow horse and 
the race horse. Yoke in the same team the best 
race horse in the world with the best plow horse 
:n the world and the very quick result will be — 
no race horse. 

In the third place, there is infinitelv less reason 
for Ireland's allying with Englan ' than wit'^ 

216 



THE SUMMING UP 

France, Spain, Germany or America. For, if a 
practical and sensible person be looking for a 
partner he will hardly, out of a world-full, choose 
the one and only one that stabbed, beat, belabored 
him, knocked him down, jumped on him. Of all 
the many practical and sensible Americans who 
have recommended to me this "practical" solution 
of the Irish question I could not find one who 
would say that in his own personal business he 
would for a moment dream of allying himself 
with such a partner. 

Finally, the thousands of well-meaning people 
who wish what is best for Ireland, point out 
seven "insuperable" obstacles to Ireland's free- 
dom. They are: 

1. The Anglo-Irish — the Orangemen and all 
cf the other Anti-Irish Irishmen — will never be 
induced to accept separation from England. 

2. In a free Ireland the Irish Catholics can 
not be trusted to treat the Protestant minority 
fairly. 

3. Anyhow, the Catholic majority, which all 
the world knows to be poor and thriftless, could 
not be permitted to run the progressive, indus- 
trious and wealthy Protestant minority. 

4. Ireland is financially unable to run her- 
self. 

5. Because of Ireland's strategic position, 

217 



IRELAND'S CASE 

England, even with the best intention in the 
world, could not, in self-defense, afford to have 
a free Ireland at her back door. 

6. If England freed Ireland tomorrow one or 
other big Continental power would grab her up 
on the day after. 

7. Ireland has been for so many long cen- 
turies conquered, that, according to the law of 
Nations, she has long lost her claim to freedom. 

We shall look over these seven insuperable 
obstacles. 

I. The real Irish in Ireland will hardly give 
up in despair if the Orangemen and other Anglo- 
Irish, refuse to accept separation from England. 
Generously consenting to bury in oblivion the 
fact that these Anglo-Irish are in enjoyment of 
the fattest parts of Ireland which their forebears 
wrongly obtained — and consenting to forget all 
the brutalities and all the savageries by which 
the Anglo-Irish continued to secure themselves 
in the possession of the goods and of the power 
of Ireland, the real Irish people have, for a hun- 
dred years, been stretching hands of forgiveness 
and entreaty to these people, begging them to be 
loyal to the country in which they live — and on 
which they thrive — begging them to accept for- 
giveness, and to be brothers working with their 
Irish brothers, shoulder to shoulder for Ireland. 
Today, as ever, the hands of the Irish are 

218 



THE SUMMING UP 

stretched to their Anglo-Irish brethren. If they 
choose to accept, and to give their loyalty to, the 
country that has borne them and bred them, cher- 
ished and fed them, then they are equally wel- 
come with their Irish brethren to all the benefits 
and all the joys of a fre^ Ireland. But if they 
find they cannot bear to be separated from their 
beloved England, they are made heartily wel- 
come to bring themselves to the country to 
which they give their love and their loyalty. "If 
you do not love me, you are free to leave me," is 
a solution both simple and just. 

2. To get the measure of Irish Catholic intol- 
erance, when they have their old persecutors in 
their power, the reader need only be referred 
backward some chapters. 

Note there just how intolerant in the sixteenth 
century were these Irish Catholics when the 
reign of Mary put Papistry in the ascendant. 

Note how intolerant they were in the seven- 
teenth century, when they had all power in their 
hands at the beginning of the Williamite wars — 
in circumstances under which an angel might 
well be excused for being intolerant. 

In the beginning of the nineteenth century, 
William Parnell, who lived his life among the 
Irish people, said, "The Irish Roman Catholics 
bigots! Perverse and superficial men have ad- 
vanced this falsehood in the very teeth of fact, 

2IQ 



IRELAND'S CASE 

and contrary to the most distinct evidence of his- 
tory," The case of the Irish Catholics, he says, 
ib the only instance known to history of op- 
pressed and persecuted ones, on returning to 
power, refraining from visiting vengeance upon 
those who had trampled them. 

In the middle of the nineteenth century the 
Presbyterian Isaac Butt testified (in his "Plea 
for the Celtic Race") "Limerick and Cork (Cath- 
olic cities) are free from religious dissension. In 
(Protestant) Belfast, the town has been held for 
days by partisan mobs." 

And in the beginning of the twentieth century, 
the Protestant historian, Mrs. Green, testifies, 
"Irish Protestants never had cause for fear in 
Ireland, on religious grounds." 

While such an idea as a Catholic Mayor for 
Protestant Derry and Protestant Belfast is laugh- 
ably absurd, such Catholic cities as Dublin, Cork, 
Limerick, Kilkenny, often honor Protestant cit- 
izens by making them their first magistrates. 
And while the idea of a Catholic Member of 
Parliament sitting for any of the Protestant 
Counties of the Northeast is ludicrously laugh- 
able, purely Catholic Counties in both North and 
South frequently elect Protestants to represent 
them in Parliament. 

And finally, and above all, be it remembered 
that almost every man whom the Irish Catholics 

220 



THE SUMMING UP 

cl'ose as their National leader from the days of 
Robert Emmet to the days of Charles Stuart 
Parnell, has been Protestant. 

There is bigotry in Ireland — bigotry of the 
most intolerant, most rampant, type — but it is 
almost entirely confined to non-Catholics of the 
Brito-Irish part of the population. 

"Forgiveness to the injured doth belong, 
They ne'er forgive who do the wrong." 

In the case of Catholic Ireland, the bigotry 
barrier comes down with a crash. 

3. The legend that the Celtic (Catholic) ma- 
jority is shiftless, and the English and Scotch 
blooded (Protestant) minority is thrifty, pro- 
gressive, and wealthy, has been so often shouted 
by the shouters, that a multitude of even think- 
ing people have come to believe it. 

This is a typical English legend about Ireland 
— and displays typical English brilliancy — but 
for so long has it done foul service that it is time 
now to explode the legend once and for all. 

Here is the recipe for concocting the legend — 
First, assault your man, blackjack him, bind him 
hand and foot, rob him of all he has — and bestow 
the plunder on your friend. Next, pass laws for- 
bidding the victim to arise, forbidding him to un- 
tie his hands and feet, and forbidding any one to 

221 



IRELAND'S CASE 

render him aid. Finally, call upon the world to 
behold the contrast of the shiftless, thriftless 
creature who wallows in his misery — and the 
splendid, progressive, industrious, well-to-do fel- 
low (your friend) who stands erect. 

And there should be a most convincing case 
against the victim. 

Only, unfortunately for your case, while you 
are pre-occupied telling the world about his shift- 
lessness, the corded creature was tmtying the 
knots with his teeth, painfully rising up, and des- 
perately trying to improve his condition. 

And while you were pre-occupied telling the 
world about your thrifty, progressive, industri- 
ous, and wealthy friend, this fine upstanding 
friend was getting bowed and broken. "Ill got, 
ill gone." 

For the million who were misled into believ- 
ing the English legend about Celtic shiftlessness 
and British thriftiness, the following few cold 
facts will prove a tonic . 

Dr. O'Riordan, in "Catholicity and Progress," 
quotes from the Government statistics (of '82— 
evidently the latest then available) the compar- 
ative income tax assessments for boasting Ulster 
and for the miserable, more Celtic, provinces. 
Here they are: 

£ s. d. 
Leinster 10 9 6 per head 

222 



THE SUMMING UP 

Munster 6 07" " 

Ulster 5 14 5 " " 

Connaught ... 3 13 7 



rt 19 



And the comparative figures for income tax on 
profits in the professions and trades : 

£ s. d. 

Leinster 4 2 6 per head 

Ulster I 81" " 

Munster ...... i 74" *' 

The reader will admit that 'tis mortal pity the 
Ulster legend should be spoilt — by Providence 
and the taxing-man. 

Again, within Ulster itself, where the Catholic 
Celt was robbed of his all, and denied all rights 
and privileges — and everything lavished on the 
Protestant Scot — the former is "coming back" 
at the same amazing rate at which the latter is 
going under. 

Today fifty-six per cent, of the farms, and 
fifty-seven per cent, of the farmers in Ulster are 
Catholic Celts — the men who had been robbed of 
thdr all. T«day these people have secured more 
thaa one-half of the Parliamentary representa- 
Isofi ©{ the province that had been stolen from 
"^em. Today the Ulster Catholic, whose fore- 
fathers had been hunted into the holes and the 
focks of the most barren mountains — jv* stream- 

223 



IRELAND'S CASE 

ing down the valleys and flowing over the fer- 
tile plains, winning back, buying them back, from 
the usurpers' descendants who are fast losing 
their grasp upon them, losing their pre-eminent 
wealth, losing their footing — "melting like the 
snow off the ditch in May." 

In the city of Derry — a typical case — ^where, 
only a hundred years ago, no Catholic dare en- 
gage in any trade or profession, and no Catholic 
dare own a house, and no Catholic dare live— in 
that city, to-day, the Catholic Celt, swarming in 
the trades and professions, forms a majority of 
the population, and returns his choice as Parlia- 
mentary representative for that once, great 
stronghold of Ascendancy. 

And, as final illustration of the progressiveness 
ct the Scottish blooded in Ulster, as compared 
with the thirftlessness of the Celt, I would in- 
stance from Dr. O'Riordan's book (a matter like- 
wise recorded by Butt in "The Irish Land and 
the Irish People") the case of the Protestant 
Colonization Societies, founded in 1830 and 1840, 
when the Ascendancy Party took alarm at the 
rapid melting away of the Protestant population 
and the fearfully rapid advancement of the Cath- 
olic — or as more picturesquely put in the Pros- 
pectus of the 1840 Society, "Where the estab- 
lished Church once stood, now stands the Popish 

224 



THE SUMMING UP 

Mass-house, pouring forth the soul-destroying 
doctrines of immorality of Maynoothl" 

To remedy this deplorable state of things and 
keep Ulster Protestant, the Societies proposed 
to take great tracts of landlords' demesne land, 
colonize them with Protestants, build houses for 
these people, and start them on the way to 
wealth. In 1832, the first colony was planted — on 
the estate of Sir Edward Hayes in County Don- 
egal. Protestant families were selected in thrifty 
Scotland, brought over and given houses and 
farms — after each of them had, for the 
world's good, signed and sealed this chief con- 
dition — "Every tenant distinctly understands and 
agrees that no Roman Catholic, under any pre- 
tence whatever, shall be permitted to reside or 
be employed in this colony." The result of the 
laudable project is very forcibly put in the sim- 
ple report obtained fifty years later from a resi- 
dent in a nearby locality — "There is not a rem- 
nant of the original settlers in the place for many 
years. They remained for some time till they 
spent any means they had, and went away, 
paupers. . . . The houses are now in a 
tumble-down condition." 

That is to say, in the place where the oppressed 
and persecuted Celt thrived so that he went forth 
to buy up and absorb the possessions of his rich 
neighbors on the fertile plains, the industrious 

225; 



IRELAND'S CASE 

Scot, started with gifts of land and house, and 
aided by every favor the powers could show, 
sank into pauperdom, and disappeared in the 
course of a couple of decades ! 

And now that we can appreciate the rare flavor 
of it, let us repeat — **The Catholic majority which 
all the world knows to be poor and thriftless 
could not be permitted to run the progressive, 
industrious, and wealthy Protestant minority." 

4. But, anyhow, Ireland is financially unable 
to run itself. 

Here, hark back to the Childers' Commission 
(of 1896), composed almost entirely of Britons, 
appointed by the British Government — for the 
purpose of finding the facts about the financial re- 
lations of Ireland and Britain — hark back to that 
Commission, and note its main findings : 

a) That the running of Ireland cost (propor- 
tionately) nearly twice as much as the running 
of England. 

(b) That the excessive cost seemed to them 
to be caused by Ireland's connection with Brit- 
ain. 

(c) That Ireland herself was not only paying 
a fair cost for her own running — but that, 

(d) Ireland, herself, was paying an unfair ex- 
cess cost. 

226 



THE SUMMING UP 

(e) That Ireland, besides, was not only pay- 
ing her fair contribution to the Imperial purse 
{paying for holding herself down) — but also, 

(f) That Ireland was paying a very large 
sum over and above her fair contribution to the 
Imperial purse — paying one-eleventh of the tax 
revenue of the three Kingdoms, while her tax ca- 
pacity was only one-twentieth. 

(g) That in excessive Imperial contribution 
alone — principal and interest — England had then 
robbed from Ireland $1,250,000,000 (an im- 
mensely larger sum now). 

"And while this heavy ransom was being ex- 
acted," says Mrs. Green, "Ireland was represent- 
ed as a beggar, never satisfied, at the gates of 
England." 

So, while the reader now sees that Ireland has 
been financially able to run and outrun herself— 
he may also divine the truth that her master is 
determined she shall not be long so. 

5. England, in self-defense, cannot afford a 
free Ireland at her back-door. 

England can no more afford to have a free Ire- 
land at her back-door than can Germany afford 
to have a free Belgium, or France a free Switz- 
erland, Austria to have a free Servia, or America 
a free Mexico alongside her — no more than can 
John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil afford to 

227 



IRELAND'S CASE 

have a free little competitor running his little 
one-horse store just over the way. 

If it be the New Justice that the greedy brute 
among eitlier the nations or the corporations has 
the divine right to gobble up the little fellow w^ho 
lies near him, or if it be the new morals to en- 
throne Strategy on the emptied seat of Justice, 
then we have first sfot to reform Heaven before 
we can reform earth to our liking, in the new 
era. 

6. If England freed Ireland tomorrow, one 
of the Continental powers would gobble Ireland 
up on the day after. 

If England freed Ireland tomorrow, Ireland, 
instead of having one army and one fleet guard- 
ing her, would, through the jealousy of the Pow- 
ers, next day be guarded by half a dozen armies 
and half a dozen fleets. For her own selfish in- 
terests, England would then have to guard Ire- 
land more zealously than ever — against the greed 
of the other Povvers — and the other Powers 
would have to guard it against the greed of Eng- 
land. Ireland would have the same greedy, 
jealous protection that has Servia, Holland, 
Switzerland and Denmark. 

7. Ireland has been so long conquered that by 
the law of nations she has lost her claim to free- 
dom. 

There is many a rank injustice established by 

228 



THE SUMMING UP 

the Law of Nations — the law of the big trusts 
iramed against the little fellows. But tne law 
oi Heaven is a little way above and beyond the 
Law of Nations. 

Moreover, one might ask the advocate of the 
Law of Nations, After how many years does in- 
justice become justice? After how many years' 
persistence in doing a wrong will that wrong 
automatically become a right? 

And further — and this pomt is most important 
— will the reader remember that in reality Ire- 
land has never been conquered? 

A nation is never conquered till its resistance 
has been beaten down, its spirit broken, and that, 
despairingly dropping its hands, it cries, I give in. 
During her long long struggle, Ireland has been 
a thousand times defeated, but never once con- 
•quered. A thousand times beaten to earth, she 
has a thousand times returned to the struggle, 
renewed and determined. From the day England 
first set her foot in Ireland, down to the present 
day, Ireland has never ceased to fight the injus- 
tice — it has been one prolonged seven hundred 
years' war between little, weak Ireland, and great 
strong England — the struggle has never abated, 
never slackened its intensity. And if England 
should still persist in her unjust claim, all who 
know the Irish nature know well that Ireland will 
continue the war for another seven hundred 

229 



IRELAND'S CASE 

years — for seventeen hundred years, if necessary. 
What man, or what nation, or Law of Nations, 
decides that Ireland, never having ceased to fight, 
forfeited her right of freedom? And, then, at 
what point in the struggle, at what date, did she 
forfeit this right? Or, if she continues the strug- 
gle, when will she have forfeited it? 

Today Germany has overrun Belgium. The 
Belgians are fighting for their country's freedom. 
All Americans are, properly, applauding the Bel- 
gians in their brave struggle. There is no Amer- 
ican so unprincipled as to question Belgium's 
right to freedom — none so absurd as to advocate 
that Belgium should be satisfied with Home 
Rule under Germany — even if under the provi- 
sion of this Home Rule Belgium were granted all 
power over Belgian taxation. There is no Amer- 
ican so unjust as to advocate Colonial Home 
Rule under Germany as a settlement of the Bel- 
gian question. 

Now, if we consider the Belgian fight contin- 
ued indefinitely — after how many years, or how 
many centuries, of struggle, will Americans begin 
to preach that Belgians have forfeited their claim 
to rule Belgium? Would not a true and just 
man, the more applaud Belgium the longer she 
sustained the unequal struggle? And would he 
not say that her claim to freedom increased with 
every additional year she fought the unequal 

230 



THE SUMMING UP 

fight — that the claim multiplied a hundred-fold 
for every terrible century during which she 
bravely prolonged it? 

When, then, any other nation on earth, strug- 
gling for its freedom, would, with a prolongation 
of the struggle, win more applause, and more 
firmly establish its claim to freedom, in the 
world's eyes, why should Ireland alone forfeit 
her claim by having prolonged her gallant and 
marvellous struggle through agonizing centur- 
ies? 

And thus are disposed of the seven insuperable 
obstacles to Ireland's freedom. Than Ireland, 
nc other nation on earth has more unquestionably 
established its claim to freedom. 

And Ireland shall win. Though, if she were 
never to win, the very fight for freedom carries 
with it all the spiritual benefits of freedom. They 
who struggle for fredom are already free. 

While other races, with less moral stamina, 
would long since have resigned themselves to 
the seemingly inevitable, and sunk into the 
degradation of slavery— becoming faithful slaves 
to kind masters — the Irish people, scorning the 
Ime of least resistance, chose suffering and strug- 
gle — and thereby found salvation — preserved and 
festered all that was noble in their natures, and 

231 



IRELAND'S CASE 

from the seed of suffering even now reap a heav- 
enly harvest. 

Ireland, a nation, shall, with God's help, live 
and flourish. 

With her wonderful spirit vision Ethna Car- 
bery foresaw the glorious dawning — as set forth 
in one of the most beautiful of her poems: 

MO CHRAOIBHIN CNO 

A Sword of Light hath pierced the dark, our eyes 
have seen the Star; 

Oh Eire, leave the ways of sleep now days of 

promise are; 
The rusty spears upon your walls are stirring to 

and fro. 

In dreams they front uplifted shields — Then 
wake, 

Mo Chraoibhin Cnol 

The little waves creep whispering where sedges 
fold you in, 

And round you are the barrows of your buried 

kith and kin; 

f ■ ' 

^Pronounced Mo chreeveen no. "My cluster of 
nuts" — my brown-haired girl, i. e., Ireland. When 
It was treason to sing of Ireland openly, the olden 
poets sang of and to their beloved unaer many fig- 
urative names. 

232 



THE SUMMING UP 

Oh! famine-wasted, fever-burnt, they faded like 

the snow. 
Or set their hearts to meet the steel — for you. 
Mo Chraoibhin Cno! 

Their names are blest, their caoine sung, our 

bitter tears are dried; 
We bury Sorrow in their graves. Patience we 

cast aside; 
Within the gloom we hear a voice that once was 

ours to know — 
'Tis Freedom — Freedom calling loud, Arise! 
Mo Chraoibhin Cno ! 

Afar beyond that empty sea, on many a battle- 
place, 

[Your sons have stretched brave hands to Death 
before the foeman's face — 

Down the sad silence (A your rest their war- 
notes faintly blow, 

And bear an echo of your name — of yours, 
Mo Chraoibhin Cno ! 

Then wake, a gradh ! We yet shall win a gold 

crown for your head. 
Strong wine to make a royal feast — the white 

wine and the red — 
And in your oaken mether the yellow mead shall 

flow 

233 



IRELAND'S CASE 

What day you rise, in all men's eyes a (jueen. 
Mo Chraoibhin Cnol 

The silver speech our fathers knew shall once 

again be heard. 
The hre-lit story, crooning song, sweeter than lilt 

of bird; 
Your quicken-tree shall break in flower, its ruddy 

fruit shall glow. 
And the Gentle People dance beneath its shade- 
Mo Chraoibhin Cno! 

There shall be peace and plenty — the kindly open 
door; 

Blessings on all who come and go — the prosper- 
ous or the poor — 

The misty glens and purple hills a fairer tint shall 
show, 

When your splendid Sun shall ride the skies 
again — 

Mo Chraoibhin Cnol 

THE PARTING WORD 
In this work is sketched an outline only of one 
of the saddest, terrible tragedies the world ever 
witnessed — the crucifixion of a noble nation. 

The picture is incomplete. But the little that 
has here been set down suffices to show that the 
inhuman barbarity and demonaic savagery with 

234 



''The Four Winds of Eirinn" 

The Poems of ETHNA CARBEIIY. 



This is one of the most beautifnl boolcs -of poetry that has 
come out of Irelaud since Mangan's day. 

In its many thousands of copies it has gone to the hearths 
of the humblest cabins in the land, and warmed shivering 
hearts there. And it has gone to every corner of the globe, 
spilling on its course the fragrance of Ireland. 

So deep and strong has been its appeal, that it has sold 
more copies, propably. than ail other oooks of Irish poetry 
published in Ireland during a generation. 

Fiona 2IucLcod, in The Wings of Destiny says: One copy 
of such a book as "The Four Winds of Eirinn" is ^enough to 
light many unseen flres. ... In essential poetTc faculty 
Ethna Carbery falls behind none save Mr Yeats and ''A. E.'' — 
but I doubt if a|iy of these has more intimately reached the 
hearts of the peiiple. Than Mr. Yeats, Ethna Carbery, while 
not less saturated with the Gaelic atmosphere^ possesses a 
simplicity of thought and 'diction foreign to the most subtle 
of contemporary poets. 

Joaqxiin Miller: This book has' given me the most delightful 
memor'^s of m.y life. The music lives and lingers as some 
far, faint song of the minstrels of old time that I may never 
hear again ; as perfume and memory blending in one ; and 
indescribable. 

J once Kilmer (of the 2.-U- Yorh Times Literary Review) 
says": I consider Ethna Cal-bery one of the few great poets 
of the last hundred years. 

The Iieader (RanFranciS'-o) . Many weary days shall pass. 
and ypars will be counted by «»i-ie score, before the touch of 
Ethna Carbery's gen'us:. the wu-i of her song, and the music 
of her lyre, will he forgotten. 

The Daily 'News (London) : ^vi this' book we move from 
wonder to wonder. It is natui-./ magic in the truest sense 
of the word. No less remiu-kab'e than the prodigality of 
fancy is the richness and varie(?r of melody which 'ammate 
Its sounds. The m.nsic is everyvvbtvc true, and as full as it 
is new On^ marvels at the sponta^eousness of every thought 
a-'Xl e^ery word. With as little effort, or premeditation, as 
tl'e birds in the Land of Perpetual Youth sang^ his gifted 
child of Irish song. 

The Glohe (New York) : Ethna Carbery (surpasses all other 
poets of the Celtic school in the heart-uality of her verse. 
Hers is a pure white passion if or beauty, such as is 
revealed by the fev/ great poets of the warld. 

Al}erdeen Free Press: This is ove nf the most striking pi'o- 
ductions'of the Irish Literary Renaissance. 



lite United Irishman: She was herself a poem Incarnate; 
tender and sweet, and true and pure, gracious and reflned, as 
one of her Irish princesses, and kindly as one of her peasants. 
God gave her grand, rare gifts, and she dedicated them to a 
high, holy cause. Her life was all too short, but her works 
will live after her for all time. 

Post free, $1.10. 



Prose Works of Ethna Carbery 

1. In the Celtic Past. Kero Tales. Post free, $1.10. 

2. The Passionate Hearts. Love Stories. With cover design 
in three colour^, by "AE." Post free, $1.|). 

The Independent (Dublin) : Seldom, if ever, has the most 
potent of pasiiious whicli stir the souls and sway the destinies 
of mankind been painted with more beauty and power. 

Cork Sttn: Prose poems, combining the melody of the lyre, 
the dignity of the epic, and the vivid movement of the drama. 

To-Dap: These stories throb with an ardent, passionate 
love. They are beautiful. 1 canpot write any better of them. 
lOthna Carbery gives a real itSight into the character and 
uatui-e of a people that we shali never rule and never under- 
stand. Here, indeed, is a book written by a poet end an 
artist with a great love in her heart. 

United Irishman: Wlthi" the pages of the "Passionate 
Hearts" he who seeks will 3nd the spirit of Ireland longing 
and satisfied; the spirit of all humanity, wet-eyed and weary, 
toiling on its upward way, but, above all, writ large, he will 
find the glowing heart c' woman. 

Glasgow Herald: They come with a sense of revelation. 
. . . They are full of passion and joy and sadness. 

Neio York Times: They are full of /the beautiful patho.s of 
Irish poetry, the magic of Irish music, and the elusive charm 
of Irish folk-lore, and convey the atmosphere of sijicei'ity 
which only tlows fi'om a pen dipped in the author's own 
heart. 

From THE IRISH PUBLISHING CO.. 
Box 1313 New York City 



THE SUMMING UP 

which Ireland has been ravaged — from the first 
day of the English invasion to the present day — 
IS without parallel in history. The reader will 
have seen how an ancient land which led the 
world in culture, was ravished by the destroyer, 
and that light which had been Europe's lode star, 
extinguished — how an honorable race was de- 
graded — a brave people beaten into the earth. 
He will also see how, in this worthy land, a pow- 
er which successfully presents itself to the world 
as a pillar of liberty and a pioneer of civilization, 
has, with wanton deviltry, throughout seven cen- 
turies, wrought havoc and spread desolation, 
trampling the smiling garden into a piteous wil- 
derness, and hounding its noble denizens like 
savage beasts. 

The reader will now, I hope, better understand 
and appreciate the strange Irish spirit which, 
without failing, has watched the millions of the 
power of her manhood and the flower of her 
womanhood driven out from her, and scattered 
like chaff to the winds of the world — and without 
quailing, has witnessed every foot of green hill- 
side again and again crimsoned with the blood 
of her best. And he will, I think, understand 
how it is that in Ireland a felon's cap is honored 
above a King's crown — that the dungeon cells 
wherein, through the generations, the noblest of 
our race rotted or went mc^d, are reverenced as 

235 



IRELAND'S CASE 

Saints' cells — and how, here, thousands of men 
and women would crush and struggle for the 
privilege of kissing the steps that go up to the 
gallows-tree — how the jail has, for Ireland, be- 
come "a holy place, and the gibbet a sacred sign. 
He will realize that Ireland has agonized in 
the garden of the ages, and sweat a bloody sweat: 
over the cruel flints, bloodied by her bleeding feet, 
through the jeering multitude, she has passed, 
dragging her heavy cross, and struggled up her 
toilsome Calvary — and, taunted by the jeers and 
pricked by the spears of the tyrant's servitors, 
endured her terrible crucifixion. 

But the faithful weep not, knowing that the 
Easter of the crucified cometh — the glorious ris- 
ing time, the Resurrection Morn ! 



(Spread the Light — ^The reader is requested to 
lend this book to an American friend who needs 
to know the truth about Ireland — and to contin- 
ue lending it till it wears itself out doing worthy 
work. Both God and Ireland will bless the eager 
lender. And the borrower won't fail to get a 
whiff of the blessing). 

236 



SPREAD THE LIGHT. 

If IRELAND'S CASE has won your approval, we want yon 
to help to bring it to the attention of every tyranny-hating, 
liberty-loving American— every College Pi-esldent aHd Trofes- 
Bor, School Teacher, Clergyman, (of every denomination), 
Banker, Lawyer, Doctor, Congressman, Senator— and tJius, 
with IRELAND'S CASIC win ardent recruits for Ireland's 
cause. 

Get booksellers to stock the book. 

Get ardent lovers of Ireland, tnen and women, to sell it. 

Get your neighbours to buy it, beg It, borrow it, or steal It, 
from you. 

Get it into the hands, and heads, and hearts of everyone, 
everywhere. 

To secure wide distribution for the book, special terms are 
given. While one paper covered copy costs 60 cents, post free, 
and one cloth bound (green cloth, gilt lettered), $1.10, 

3 copies (either kind) will be given for price of 2. 

6 copies (either kind) will be given for price of 4 

10 copies (either kind) will be given for price of 6. 

25 copies (paper bound) given for $8.00. 

50 copies; (paper bound) given for $15.00. 
100 copies (paper bound) given for $25.00. 
Write at once, enclosing money order, to 

THE MacMANUS MANAGEMENT 

P. O. Box 1313 

New York 



Would you like to know Ireland— 'see Ireland—hear Ireland'-' 

feel Ireland t 

IRISH LECTURE-RECITALS BY 

SEUMAS MacMANUS 

are accepted, for any part of America, by 

The Management of SEUMAS MacMANUS 

P. O. Box 13ia, New York Citj 

SUBJECTS: 

Readings from Hi"* Own Boolss. 
An Irish Story-Telling. 

The Glories, the Sorrows, and the Hopes of Ireland. 
A Ramble 'Round Ireland, Illustrated with lOO Beautiful, 
Colored Views. 
The Irish Question. 
Fairy and Folk-lore. 
Irish Wit and Humor. 

SEUMAS MacMANUS, the Irish poet, is a brilliant repre- 
sentative of a poetic race. Toetry and n^ysticism. wit, 
humor and pathos, are everywhere present in his work. And 
audiences are held spellbound at the will of this prince of 
Btory-tellers.— fiosfon Transcript. 

As child and youth, he sat at the feet of the Shanachies 
by the turf fires, and lived the life of his own people, until, 
saturated with the Celtic spirit, this brilliant spokesman of 
a wonderful people now comes to enthrall us with his de- 
lightful intellectual diversions. — San Francisco lUilleiin. 

Edmund Clarence Stednian said; He is the poet story-teller, 
from ancient time ; the rbapsodist ; the Irish Homer. 

Judge Ben Lindsey: Never in my experience have I heard 
a more wonderful story-telling. 

Dr. Washington Oladden: Don't miss the delight of hear- 
ing Seumas MacManus: ! 

William Allen White, of Kansas : He has a marvellous gift 
of story-telling and power of holding his audience. 

National Geographical Society; President Henry Oannett: 
Rarely has a lectnier captured our audience as completely 
as did Seumas MacManus. 

Library Commission of Portland, Ore.: His twelve lectures 
and story-tellings here, were the very happiest thing that 
happened to us in many a long day. On the last night, the 
crowd filled all seats, lined the walls, sat on the platform, 
packed the entrance — and no one moved during the two hours. 
There's magic for you ! 

University of Wisconsin: He charmed the University Club 
diners with a talk utterly unlike any other literary treat that 
they have ever had.— T/ie Democrat. 

University of Missouri: It was n great night for Ireland— 
and the University of Missouri.— 7'/ic Herald. 

University of Michigan: The surprising novelty and unique- 
ness of his discourse, delighted his three thousand eager 
auditors.— rft'« Times-News. 



Columhia University: In his Beries of six lecture-reeitala, 
^e spell of his poetry, the eucliuutmeut of his pi'ose, liis 
^^uaiut aiid beautilui tales, lielci Uis large audiences charmed. — 
2Ue LoluinUiu iSpectatur. 

Dean Briggs of Harvard : Everyone enjoyed Seuma« Mac- 
Manus' readings exceedingly. 

Vnwersity of Texas: No lectures at the University In 
recent years have given more general satisfaction than those 
•«f Seumas MacManus.— C. S. I'otts, M.A. 

University of Kansas: It was a very unusual and effective 
lecture. — Chancellor Strong. 

■University of Indiana: If 1 were myself a poet, I should try 
to find words which would tell fittingly how Seumas Mac- 
Manus' writing and his speaking express the finest spirit 
of Ireland.— Dr. Bryan. 

The Lomparutive Literature Society of N Y.: He moved 
our difficult audience to frequent sudden laughter, or nobly 
touched them to sileuce by the simple dignity and human 
feeling of his theme.— Dr. Merle ;St. Croix Wright- 

Buffalo, JV Y. — Although so ill that he had to be earned 
on the stage of Shea s jTheatre in a chair, Seumas Mac- 
Manus last night delivered the qiost impressive address on 
Ireland ever heard by the people of Buffalo. — The Buffalo 
Evening News. 

Normal School, Edinboro, Pa —lie held the children spell- 
bound, and the adults were as the childi-en. He is an edu- 
cational inspiration ! ! — Frank E. Baker, President. 

Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences: On the occastion. 
•of each of his preceding lectures hundreds had to be turned 
away for lack of accommodation— but last night the numbers 
turned away at least equalled what found seating accom- 
modation.— 2'?ic Brooklyn Eagle. 

Notre Dame Unioersity, lud.— The students of this year cau 
never forget the great advantage they enjoyed in hearing 
Seumas MacManus's course of twelve lectures. The lime he 
«pent with us was a period memorable and full 'of inspira- 
tion. — Rev. John Cavanaugh, C.S.C, President. 

University of Nevada: Seumas MacManus' lecture was a 
gem — both in matter and the manner of delivery. For two 
hours he held an audience of students literally entranced by 
Ills stories.— President J. E. Stubbs. 

Smith College: He captured us from the first words, and 
we listened breathlessly as children do. — Smith College 
Monthly. 

Teachers' Association of Essex Co., Mass.: Seumas Mac- 
Manus' stories delighted and refreshed two thousand tired 
teachers at our annual meeting in Tremont Temple, Boston.— 
•Charles E, Towne, President. 

Alahama Polytechnic Institutp: The beautiful views, the 
wit, the eloquence, and the literary charm of the lecturer, 
made for us an evening of notable delight and profit. It 
was one of the pleasantest evenings 1 ever enjoyed.— Dr. 
Charles C. Thach, President. 

Baylor College, Texas. — No one has ever been before this 
student body who gave such general satisfaction as Seumas 
MacManus.— Dr. J. C. Hardy. 



Ballads of a Country Boy 

OTHER MacMANUS BOOKS 

The Leader (San Francisco) says: A book to cherish, to 
Btaile over, and weep over by turns, is Ballads of a Country 
Boy." . . . We meet here all the characteristics that have 
made of Ireland a great and holy nation. . . , Seumas Mac- 
Manus shares with Ethna Carbery her magnificent sensuous- 
ness of imagery, and haunting melody of versification. The 
poems of both stand for what Is most distinctly national, 
and, in a literary way, most excelling, in recent Irish verse. 

Hew Ireland Eeview: It would be hard to find a new vol- 
ume of popular poetry which excites one's interest from be- 
ginning to end to the same degree as the simple ballads of 
Seumas MacManus. Here we have the joyful, the sorrowful, 
the beautiful, and everywhere the interesting. 

Fiona MacLeod: What pleasure it gave me, with its lilt fresh 
from the hillsides of Donegal, and its blithe spirit, brave and 
glad, alike in storm and shine ! I have looked into it again 
and again since first I read it, and never without pleasure, 
or the sudden sense of wind and air, and the ringing heart. 

The Pilot (Boston) : The melody of song-birds, the per- 
fume of Irish flowers, the soft light of Irish skies, and the 
pure passion and haunting melancholy of the Celtic heart are 
in 'these Ballads. 

Price (including postage) $1.10. 




Other MacManus Books 

l^he Woman of 8 even Sorrows. A metrical play. ^ Post free„ 
(50 cents. 

Considered either in conception or In execution, we are struck, 
with its towering excellence. — The Leader (San Francisco). 

The JJard-HecM'ted Man. (Anti-Fmigratlon Play.) In Eng- 
lish, and in Irish. 60 cents. "A powei-ful piece of work. Our 
interest never flags from start to finish."— Z7«ife(Z Irishman. 

Doctor Kilgannon: A volume of Rollicking Tales. Price- 
$1.10 > 

This book has al the qualitleis that endeared the author's 
eai'lier works to the public. The rich Donegal humour is here, 
and the effervescing wit which Seumas MacManus possesses in. 
unusual degree. "Doctor Kilgannon" falls little short of "A 
Lad of the O'Frlels" in Its richness of colouring and literary 
charms. — The Overland Monthly. . 

Bonegal Fairy Stories. Price $1.40. 

In Chimney Corners— Folk-lore tales. Price $1.65. 

The Leadin' Road to Donegal. $1.65. 

THE MacMANUS MANAGEMENT 
P. O. Box 1313, New York 






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